“Don’t you think that work of very personal genius often _has_ a country? It may break through accidents of birth to perfect conditions somewhere; not necessarily contemporary ones or those of the country it happens in?” “I suppose you could find a country or a time for almost _anything_. But I am sure that the _best_ has in reality _no_ Time and no Country. That is why it accepts without fuss any country or time for what they are worth; thence the seeming contradiction, that it is always _actual_. It is alive, and nationality is a portion of actuality.” “But _is_ the best work always ‘actual’ and up to date?” “It always has that appearance. It’s manners are perfect.” “I am not so sure that manners cannot be overdone. A personal code is as good as the current code.” “The point seems to me to be, in that connexion, that manners are not very important. You use them as you use coins.” “The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were diametrically opposed to those of their time,” she said carefully. “I don’t think that is so; except in so far as all effectual men are always the enemies of every time. With that fundamental divergence, they give a weight of impartiality to the supreme thesis and need of their age. Any opinion of their fellows that they adopt they support with the uncanny authority of a plea from a hostile camp. _All activity_ on the part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox. To produce is the sacrifice of genius.” They seemed to have an exotic grace to him as they promenaded their sinuous healthy intellects in this eighteenth-century landscape. There was no other pair of people who could talk like that on those terraces. They were both of them barbarians, head and shoulders taller than the polished stock around. And they were highly strung and graceful. They were out of place. “Your philosophy reminds me of Jean-Jacques,” she said. “Does it? How do you arrive at that conclusion?” “Well, your hostility to a tidy rabble, and preference for a rough and uncultivated bed to build on brings to mind ‘wild nature’ and the doctrine of the natural man. You want a human landscape similar to Jean-Jacques’ rocks and water falls.”