Indeed, the whole question of originality, this desire for novelty, is in the end a question of our love of life. In the moments when we love life passionately we are not likely to get too much of it, and we do not ask to exchange it for another kind. When art and politics were creative, in the heyday of writers, painters, architects and statesmen who later seem to us almost solitary in their excellence, there was still no taking thought to be original; they fell in love, rather, with the obvious. Columbus made no voyage in search of originality—simply there had been too many hints and rumors for him to stay at home any longer. Some very original spirits, we may suppose, took no stock in his expedition. For Shakespeare or Molière play-writing was an obvious task, and an old one; they may have expected to do successfully what others had only tried, but except for the success they aimed at nothing new. Where great poets have spoken on the matter themselves, their point of view is quite clear. At the end of the _Vita Nuova_ Dante announced his hope to write of Beatrice such things as had never been written of any woman. Not to write a new kind of book, for women had been praised before, as he implied, and there had been poems of vision and pilgrimages through hell; but his hope was to excel. He determined to speak no more of his blessed lady until he could praise her worthily, and to praise such a woman worthily would be to write such things as had been written of no other. In the same mood Milton promised his great epic—in passionate love of the best before him, and in the assurance of doing as well or better—“I began thus to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting, which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die.” This is the great manner of the poets. But in the opening words of Rousseau’s _Confessions_, to take an opposite example, we have the accent of the modern disease; he would undertake, he said, an enterprise of which there had never been a parallel, and of which there would be no imitation—he would tell the truth about one man, about himself. He promised no excellence except the uniqueness of the subject, for truth-telling, though always desirable, can hardly be important unless the subject is worth while.