our
own time, was an unpardonable fault.

He loved humanity better than men and women. He loved nature
better than humanity.

He was a man with little sense of humour and with little interest in
other men. He lived for his memories and his dreams, his glimpses
and his visions.

Turning away from all dogmatic creeds, he yet sought God and
prayed to him for his mercy.

Born into a world whose cleverness he dreaded, whose institutions
he loathed, whose angers he provoked, whose authorities he
scandalised, whose crowds he hated, he went aside "botanizing" and
"copying music"; every now and then hurling forth from his
interludes of sentimental journeying a rhythmical torrent of eloquent
prophecy in which he himself only half believed and of which, quite
often, "the idea was stolen."

In his abnormal receptivity, he was used as a reed for the invisible
powers to blow their wild tunes through and to trouble the earth. He
produced one great Revolution, and he may, through the medium of
souls like his own, produce another; but all the time his real
happiness was in his wanderings by field and hedge and road and
lane, by canal side and by river bank, thinking the vague delicious
thoughts of sensuous solitude and dreaming over the dumb
quiescence of that mute inanimate background of our days into
which, with his exasperated human nerves, he longed to sink and be
at rest.

BALZAC

The real value of the creations of men of genius is to make richer
and more complicated what might be called the imaginative margin
of our normal life.

We all, as Goethe says, have to bear the burden of humanity--we
have to plunge into the bitter waters of reality, so full of sharp rocks
and blinding spray. We have to fight for our own hand. We have to
forget that we so much as possess a soul as we tug and strain at the
resistant elements out of which we live and help others to live.

It is nonsense to pretend that the insight of philosophers and the
energy of artists help us very greatly in this bleak wrestling. They
are there, these men of genius, securely lodged in the Elysian fields
of large and free thoughts--and we are here, sweating and toiling in
the dust of brutal facts.

The hollow idealism that pretends that the achievements of literature
and thought enter profoundly into the diurnal necessity which prods
us forward is a plausible and specious lie. We do not learn how to
deal craftily and prosperously with the world from t