n
court. These tasks fall to men whom twenty years' service in their several
callings have taught to speak for society at its best. And while their work
goes on its way, the brilliant man who refused every sort of thorough
training which society could give him, can only stand full of wonder and
anger that with all his versatilities he is left to choose between the
drudgery of unskilled labor and mere starvation.

There is another sort of man who will learn little in any occupation
because he is wholly bent upon being original. The past is all wrong, full
of errors, absurdities, iniquities. To serve apprenticeship is to
indoctrinate one's self with pernicious orthodoxies. We must rebel. We must
begin at the beginning. We must do something entirely new and
revolutionary. We must rely upon our free souls to see and to do the right,
as it has never been seen or done before. Some such declaration of
independence, some such combination of hopeless pessimism about all that
has been done, with confident optimism about what is just to be done, one
finds in men of every art, craft, and calling. We are to have perpetual
motion. We are to square the circle. We are to abandon our present
political and religious and educational institutions and get new and
perfect ones. Above all, the children must grow up free from the whole
array of social orthodoxies. We are to escape from the whole wretched
blundering past and by one bold march enter a new Garden of Eden.

There is something inspiring in this, something that stirs the youth like a
bugle, and something, as I believe, that is essential in every generation
for the purification of society. The past is as bad as anybody says it is,
woven full of inconsistency and iniquity. We _must_ escape it. We _must_
fight it. And it is no doubt inevitable that there should be some who think
that they owe it nothing but war.

And yet, for my part, I am convinced that this is a fatally one-sided view
of things. Is there in existence one great work of any sort which owes
nothing to the historic guild which does that sort of work? Is there one
great man in history who gave to the future without getting anything from
the past? The bare scientific fact is that no man escapes the tuition of
society. The crank does not escape. The freak does not escape. They miss
the highest traditions of society only to become victims of lower
traditions. Whether such a man have genius or the illusion of genius, it is