ey were for!...

As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a
community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in little groups
and duologues and circles, all with their special and narrow concerns,
all with their backs to most of the others.

What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together?
I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it
denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive,
but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in
"Let us do." That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been
accustomed to respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and
bate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every
human heart....

I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very
vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste place
covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown
by the million in ditches....

Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was
saying something about the "Will of the People...."

The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot the
smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung
aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and
rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the
swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, like
pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life
more than that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some
giantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still to come--or present it
might be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal
the last phase of mankind?...

I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly
addressed. I was as it were one o