But "duty" has here a very full meaning. The soul of the Beethoven searches, and is illumined by, the divine essence, _whatever his name for it or thought of it_. Then he renders it or manifests it for the world. The craftsman might search it as he designed a wall-paper; he who did so, who worked that he might manifest it for men, would find his invention grow ever richer and readier. The divine has no _one_ kind of manifestation or inspiration. The mother might search it to learn the highest ways of conduct with her children, not even waiting for their birth; and their souls would in time show her what she had done for them. The gardener might thus work among his flowers and would find in them a new responsiveness. There is no one who has not some work which can be fruitfully done in this spirit of bringing forth for the world. This use of will in no metaphoric sense is the real magic. When all men and women work in this way the world will begin to be for the first time an expression of the divine plan, governed--through them and of their will and choice--by the divine. By that time work will have been raised to its highest terms and there will be modes of work as inconceivable to us now as the work of Beethoven to a savage. Each of us will have found _his_ work--that is, will have found that aspect of the divine which he is uniquely constituted to deliver forth to the rest. No one can be spared. All will need all the others. All will stand unveiled as artists, creators, or showers-forth or thinkers-out of something good and necessary for the work of their fellows. We have ourselves made life dark and work monotonous, stifled the latent or nascent craftsman or thinker in ourselves and the others, and created forms of work that should never have been to do at all. Now we must live them through and be thankful that some few, the thinkers, the musicians, the poets, the artists, have in some sort broken through into a corner of their heritage and can serve us and lighten our lives and make the day nearer when we too can break through. Here then is what we may mean by "real character." It is the veiled creator or shower-forth. No man is what he seems. He is waiting for his own nature, and the divine in nature is waiting for him, to give him the ray he alone can transmit. Neither Händel nor Beethoven could have given us the music of the other; and the music of both was made possible by every bit of divine-serving and divine-revealing work that was ever done since man began. That principle holds throughout, in small and great. The humblest work, if it have one ray of the divine put into it, helps the whole world for all time to come. And no work need lack that ray, no life need lack such work. REVIEWS "Life of Leonardo da Vinci" by Professor Osvald Sirén by Carolus