In his abnormal receptivity, he was used as a reed for the invisible powers to blow their wild tunes through and to trouble the earth. He produced one great Revolution, and he may, through the medium of souls like his own, produce another; but all the time his real happiness was in his wanderings by field and hedge and road and lane, by canal side and by river bank, thinking the vague delicious thoughts of sensuous solitude and dreaming over the dumb quiescence of that mute inanimate background of our days into which, with his exasperated human nerves, he longed to sink and be at rest. BALZAC The real value of the creations of men of genius is to make richer and more complicated what might be called the imaginative margin of our normal life. We all, as Goethe says, have to bear the burden of humanity--we have to plunge into the bitter waters of reality, so full of sharp rocks and blinding spray. We have to fight for our own hand. We have to forget that we so much as possess a soul as we tug and strain at the resistant elements out of which we live and help others to live. It is nonsense to pretend that the insight of philosophers and the energy of artists help us very greatly in this bleak wrestling. They are there, these men of genius, securely lodged in the Elysian fields of large and free thoughts--and we are here, sweating and toiling in the dust of brutal facts. The hollow idealism that pretends that the achievements of literature and thought enter profoundly into the diurnal necessity which prods us forward is a plausible and specious lie. We do not learn how to deal craftily and prosperously with the world from the Machiavels and Talleyrands. We do not learn how to love the world and savour it with exquisite joy from the Whitmans and Emersons. What we do is to struggle on, as best we may; living by custom, by prejudice, by hope, by fear, by envy and jealousy, by ambition, by vanity, by love. They call it our "environment," this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward from within. But there is more in the lives of the most wretched of us than this blind struggle. There are those invaluable, unutterable moments, which we have _to ourselves,_ free of the weight of the world. There are the moments--the door of our bedroom, of our attic, of our ship's cabin, of our monastic cell, of our tenement-flat, shut against the intruder--when we can enter the company of the great shadows and largely and freely converse with them to the forgetting of all vexation.