solitude, the strength which it may impart to
the vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of
those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they
dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who did
comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said to
Phaedrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the town
are my teachers, not trees and landscape."[252] Sarcasms fell on him
like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not
share the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live
without the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back in
a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within three
months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverse
blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as to
what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours,
companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau
stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new
life away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased
to think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories
and quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently
explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the
processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all
the other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he
afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent
repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it
is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great
high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent
duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership,
enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that the
burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land more
assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimous
self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deep
thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessive
personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social
groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps
for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.

FOOTNOTES:

[201] _Rep. a M. Bordes_, 163.

[202] Pi