h that insolence of cleverness which is the enemy of genius and
all its works.

True discrimination does not ride rough-shod over the past like this.
It has felt the past too deeply. It has too much of the past in its own
blood. What it does, allowing for a thousand differences of
temperament, is to move slowly and warily forward, appropriating
the new and assimilating, in an organic manner, the material it offers;
but never turning round upon the old with savage and ignorant
spleen.

But it is hard, even in these most extreme cases, to draw rigorous
conclusions.

Life is full of surprises, of particular and exceptional instances. The
abnormal is the normal; and the most thrilling moments some of us
know are the moments when we snatch an inspiration from a quarter
outside our allotted circle.

There are certain strangely constituted ones in our midst whose
natural world, it might seem, existed hundreds or even thousands of
years ago. Bewildered and harassed they move through our modern
streets; puzzled and sad they gaze out from our modern windows.
They seem, in their wistful way, hardly conscious of the movements
about them, and all our stirring appeals leave them wearily cold.

It is with the very wantonness of ironic insult that our novelty-mongers
come to these, bringing fantastic inventions. What is it to them,
children of a nobler past, that this or the other newly botched-up
caprice should catch for an hour the plaudits of the mob?

On the other hand, one comes now and again, though rarely enough,
upon exceptional natures whose proper and predestined habitation
seems to be rather with our children's children than with us.

The word has gone forth touching what is called super-man; but the
natures I speak of are not precisely that.

Rather are they devoid in some strange manner of the gross weapons,
the protective skin, adapted to the shocks and jolts of our rough and
tumble civilisation. They seem prepared and designed to exist in a
finer, a more elaborate, in a sense a more luxurious world, than the
one we live in.

Their passions are not our passions; nor is their scorn our scorn. If
the magic of the past leaves them indifferent, the glamour of the
present finds them antipathetic and resentful. With glacial coldness
they survey both past and present, and the frosty fire of their
devotion is for what, as yet, is not.

Dull indeed should we be, if in the search of finer and more delicate
discriminat