“There are a certain number of solitary spirits moving among us who have a way of troubling us by their aloofness from our controversies, our disputes, our arguments, our ‘great problems.’ We call them Epicures, Pagans, Heathen, Egoists, Hedonists, and Virtuosos. And yet not one of these words exactly fits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and the temper of ‘the grand style’—and that is why they are so irritating and so provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is to realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to be born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced to the simplest terms, is not enough to occupy their consciousness and their passion. In this sphere—in the sphere of the ‘inevitable things’ of human life—everything becomes to them a sacrament. Not a Symbol—be it noted—but a Sacrament! The food they eat; the wine they drink; their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and reluctancies of their devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and retreats; their long loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden ‘lashings out’; their hate and their love and their affection; the simplicities of these everlasting moods are in all of us—become, every one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as it dawns, as a ‘last day,’ and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods—this is to live in the spirit of the ‘grand style.’ It has nothing to do with ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners often practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant. “When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces, that can speak, if they will, in ‘the great style.’ When a man or woman ‘argues’ or ‘explains’ or ‘moralizes’ or ‘preaches,’ they are the victims of accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and return to vanity. That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in the great style. That is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists, those who have the genius to express in words their heroic defiance of ‘the something rotten in Denmark,’ move us more, and assume a grander outline, than the equally admirable, and possibly more practical, arguments of the Scientific Socialists. It is the eternal appeal we want, to what is basic and primitive and undying in our tempestuous human nature!