But those whom life has more deeply disappointed and bored, these turn to diverting themselves with worlds that are in everything dissimilar from the one world with which ill luck has made them familiar. These are the romantics, the fantastics, who, cursed with actual imagination, devoted it in youth to pre-figuring what life must be when you became an untrammeled adult. They have faced the reality, they have faced the real and incredible antickry of men as social units. They have faced it with a candor uncharacteristic of common-sense. And they have now no further concern with the laws and other hebetudes of men, except to forget these disappointments as utterly as possible, and to divert themselves in worlds of their own creation wherein their whims are the only laws. So Ulenspiegel is sent hunting werwolves; Holy Maël is tricked into sailing northward, in a demon-rigged stone trough, among fabulous seas and immodest sirens; the huge shadow which bears obscurely, as if beneath the wings of a bat, the Seven Deadly Sins, is cast across the roof of Anthony's hut in the Thebaid; the Snow Queen is bundled into a great sledge painted white, and fetched south to kidnap little Kay; Alice is lured into the rabbit hole and tumbled, very slowly, down that very deep well whose walls were inset with cupboards and bookshelves: and the creating romantic is diverted. § 30 Meanwhile you may note the unreflective raising somewhat of a pother over the circumstance that the artist is as a rule disliked and is belittled, if not actually persecuted, by his contemporaries. Yet no other outcome can seem more natural, I am afraid, when you consider that the art of every important creative writer is an hourly protest that he finds his contemporaries dull and inadequate persons, and that he esteems the laws which they have devised, and live under, to be imbecile. Laws based upon rationality one could endure: but any sane person, as the fretted artist perceives, must regard with an eye full of provisos the professed aim of so many of our laws, to make for the public's general welfare and happiness. For the artist is logical; and therein differs from the majority of his fellows, who unthinkingly assume that all efforts to promote the well-being of mankind at large are praiseworthy. I myself concede that we are here apt, through however admirable motives, to act precipitately, where one calm instant's thought would tend to show all such efforts irreligious and illogical. By no religious code, and by no course of logic taught in any school, is the average man entitled to happiness: his demerits justify in logic the earthly misery which religion postulates: and to impose upon him happiness would be, by the best-thought-of standards, an unreasonable and blasphemous act, which, one may proudly say, American civilization has never come anywhere near committing.