ing and eager thing,
is to get men to see how direct its bearing is upon themselves. The man
who does not feel concerned when the Armenians are massacred, thousands
of miles away, because there is a sea between, is not a different man in
kind from the man who does feel concerned. The difference is one of
degree. It is a matter of area in living. The man who does feel
concerned has a larger self. He sees further, feels the cry as the cry
of his own children. He has learned the oneness and is touched with the
closeness, of the great family of the world.

V

The Autobiography of Beauty

But the brunt of the penalty of the unpopularity of the first person
singular in modern society falls upon the individual. The hard part of
it, for a man who has not the daily habit of being a companion to
himself, is his own personal private sense of emptiness--of missing
things. All the universe gets itself addressed to some one else--a great
showy heartless pantomime it rolls over him, beckoning with its nights
and days and winds and faces--always beckoning, but to some one else.
All that seems to be left to him in a universe is a kind of keeping up
appearances in it--a looking as if he lived--a hurrying, dishonest
trying to forget. He dare not sit down and think. He spends his strength
in racing with himself to get away from himself, and those greatest days
of all in human life--the days when men grow old, world-gentle, and
still and deep before their God, are the days he dreads the most. He can
only look forward to old age as the time when a man sits down with his
lie at last, and day after day and night after night faces infinite and
eternal loneliness in his own heart.

It is the man who cuts acquaintance with himself, who dares to be lonely
with himself, who dares the supreme daring in this world. He and his
loneliness are hermetically sealed up together in infinite Time,
infinite Space,--not a great man of all that have been, not a star or
flower, not even a great book that can get at him.

It is the nature of a great book that in proportion as it is beautiful
it makes itself helpless before a human soul. Like music or poetry or
painting it lays itself radiant and open before all that lies before
it--to everything or to nothing, whatever it may be. It makes the direct
appeal. Before the days and years of a man's life it stands. "Is not
this so?" it says. It never says less than this. It does not know how to
say more.

A b