the
ruins, when he squeezed out of the hole.

He felt strangely haggard and tired, and reached the village only to
find that seventy years had elapsed, and that he was an old and
forgotten man, with no place for him. He had lost his home, and though
there were one or two old grandfathers, spent and dying, who remembered
the day when he was lost, and the search made for him, yet now there
was no room for the old man. The gap had filled up, life had flowed on.
They had grieved for him, but they did not want him back. He disturbed
their arrangements; he was another useless mouth to feed.

The pretty old story is full of parables, sad and sweet. But the kernel
of the tale is a warning to all who, for any wilfulness or curiosity,
however romantic or alluring the quest, forfeit their place for an
instant in the world. You cannot return. Life accommodates itself to
its losses, and however sincerely a man may be lamented, yet if he
returns, if he tries to claim his place, he is in the way, de trop. No
one has need of him.

An artist has most need of this warning, because he of all men is
tempted to enter the dark place in the hill, to see wonderful things
and to drink the oblivious wine. Let him rather keep his hold on the
world, at whatever sacrifice. Because by the time that he has explored
the home of the merry giants, and dreamed his dream, the world to which
he tries to tell the vision will heed it not, but treat it as a
fanciful tale.

All depends on the artist being in league with his day; if he is born
too early or too late, he has no hold on the world, no message for it.
Either he is a voice out of the past, an echo of old joys, piping a
forgotten message, or he is fanciful, unreal, visionary, if he sees and
tries to utter what shall be. By the time that events confirm his
foresight, the vitality of his prophecy is gone, and he is only looked
at with a curious admiration, as one that had a certain clearness of
vision, but no more; he is called into court by the historian of
tendency, but he has had no hold on living men.

One sees men of great artistic gifts who suffer from each of these
disadvantages. One sees poets, born in a prosaic age, who would have
won high fame if they had been born in an age of poets. And one sees,
too, men who seem to struggle with big, unintelligible thoughts,
thoughts which do not seem to fit on to anything existing. The happy
artist is the man who touches the note which awakens a re