ions in the region of art, we grew blunt and blind to the
subtle-edged pathos of all these delicate differences between man
and man.

It is by making our excursions in the aesthetic world thus entirely
personal and idiosyncratic that we are best spared from the bitter
remorse implicit in any blunders in this more complex sphere.

We have learned to avoid the banality of the judicial decisions in the
matter of what is called beautiful. We come to learn their even
greater uselessness in the matter of what is called the good.

To discriminate, to discriminate endlessly, between types we adore
and types we suspect, this is well and wise; but in the long result we
are driven, whether it is pleasant to our prejudices or not that it
should be so, crushingly to recognise that in the world of human
character there are really no types at all; only tragic and lonely
figures; figures unable to express what they want of the universe, of
us, of themselves; figures that can never, in all the aeons of time, be
repeated again; figures in whose obliquities and ambiguities the
mysteries of all the laws and all the prophets are transcended!

MONTAIGNE

We, who are interested rather in literature than in the history of
literature, and rather in the reaction produced upon ourselves by
great original geniuses than in any judicial estimate of their actual
achievements, can afford to regard with serene indifference the
charges of arbitrariness and caprice brought against us by
professional students.

Let these professional students prove to us that, in addition to their
learning, they have receptive senses and quickly stimulated
imagination, and we will accept them willingly as our guides.

We have already accepted Pater, Brandes, de Gourmont, critics who
have the secret of combining immense erudition with creative
intelligence, and it is under the power and the spell of these
authoritative and indisputable names that we claim our right to the
most personal and subjective enjoyment, precisely as the occasion
and hour calls, of the greatest figures in art and letters.

Most of all we have a right to treat Montaigne as we please, even
though that right includes the privilege of _not_ reading every word
of the famous Essays, and of only reverting--in our light return to
them--to those aspects and qualities which strike an answering chord
in ourselves.

This was, after all, what he--the great humanist--was always doing;
he the unscr