"It would be much pleasanter to agree with you, uncle," Ethan remarked, as he got out the chess-board. "It's more comfortable--more companionable. I think there are few thoughts so overwhelming as what John Morley calls 'the awful loneliness of life'--the loneliness that there's no help for, that no one can reach, no one can ever share. Each one of us"--slowly, absently, he set the chessmen in their places--"each man sits apart, with his own soul and its unique experience forever incommunicable, forever different." "No; not even incommunicable, if he have genius," returned his uncle. "The odd thing is that in that case what he has to communicate is something we all recognize. We expect him to be different; we are amazed to find him just like ourselves, with the trifling addition of being able to say what the rest of us have only felt." "You have more faith in the capacity and the veracity of genius than I have. In my opinion, not one of those who have tried to reveal themselves has been able to give us more than shreds and patches of reality. And they've discounted the fragments of truth by romancing, consciously or not--making themselves better, or making themselves worse than they were. The real revelations are the unconscious ones." "St. Augustine," suggested John Gano. His nephew laughed and shook his head. "Well, Rousseau," he amended, looking in the table-drawer for a missing bishop. "Rousseau, too--exactly a case in my favor. You can't see the forest for the trees, nor the man for his confessions." John Gano shook his lion's mane. "If you could project your notion of Rousseau, uncle, and I could do the same by mine, do you suppose they would be alike?" "Possibly not; we are not in agreement about Rousseau." "Exactly; and do you think if we could summon him from the shades he would own either your Jean Jacques or mine? Not he. And he'd be right. There's more bound up in men than they've ever been able to liberate. Even genius can do no more than make signals over the prison wall." "Shakespeare, of course, never tried."