usefulness, were held of no
account, at least he could look back upon a past when he would have
seemed to be one of the few supreme favorites of the forces that shaped
man's life and destiny. Until he had started from Kronstadt four years
before on a voyage that had humiliated his proud spirit more than once,
and undermined as splendid a physique as ever was granted to even a
Russian, he had rolled the world under his foot. With an appearance
and a personal magnetism, gifts of mind and manner and character that
would have commanded attention amid the general flaccidity of his race
and conquered life without the great social advantages he inherited, he
had enjoyed power and pleasure to a degree that would have spoiled a
coarser nature long since. True, the time had come when he had cared
little for any of his endowments save as a means to great ends, when
all his energies had concentrated in the determination to live a life
of the highest possible usefulness--without which man's span was but
existence--his ambitions had cohered and been driven steadily toward a
permanent niche in history; then paled and dissolved for an hour in the
glorious vision of human happiness.

And wholly as he might realize man's insignificance among the blind
forces of nature, he could accept it philosophically and die with his
soul uncorroded by misanthropy, that final and uncompromising admission
of failure. The misanthrope was the supreme failure of life because he
had not the intelligence to realize, or could not reconcile himself to,
the incomplete condition of human nature. Man was made up of little
qualities, and aspirations for great ones. Many yielded in the
struggle and sank into impotent discontent among the small material
things of life, instead of uplifting themselves with the picture of the
inevitable future when development had run its course, and indulgently
pitying the children of their own period who so often made life hateful
with their greed, selfishness, snobbery--most potent obstacle to human
endeavor--and injustice. The bad judgment of the mass! How many
careers it had balked, if not ruined, with its poor ideals, its mean
heroes, its instinctive avoidance of superior qualities foreign to
itself, its contemptible desire to be identified with a fashion. It
was this low standard of the crowd that induced misanthropy in many
otherwise brave spirits who lacked the insight to discern the divine
spark underneath, the per