haracter, or by whatever name we choose to designate original and
vigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift. The
forceful man is a prophecy of the future. The wind blows here, but
long after it is spent the big wave which is its creature, breaks on a
shore a thousand miles away. It is curious how swiftly influences
travel from centre to circumference. A certain empress invents a
gracefully pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to the
pole, the female world is behooped; and neither objurgation of brother,
lover, or husband, deaths by burning or machinery, nor all the wit of
the satirists, are likely to affect its vitality. Never did an idea go
round civilisation so rapidly. Crinoline has already a heavier
martyrology than many a creed. The world is used easily, if one can
only hit on the proper method; and force of character, originality, of
whatever kind, is always certain to make its mark. It is a diamond,
and the world is its pane of glass. In a world so commonplace as this,
the peculiar man even should be considered a blessing. Humorousness,
eccentricity, the habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle,
are valuable, because they break the dead level of society and take
away its sameness. It is well that a man should be known by something
else than his name; there are few of us who can be known by anything
else, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the names of the majority.

In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value;
in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable. The greatness of an
artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other
artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself. The great
man is the man who does a thing for the first time. It was a difficult
thing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has been
found an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this peculiar
something resident in a poem or a painting which is its final test,--at
all events, possessing it, it has the elements of endurance. Apart
from its other values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one;
it becomes a study of character; it is a window through which you can
look into a human interior. There is a cleverness in the world which
seems to have neither father nor mother. It exists, but it is
impossible to tell from whence it comes,--just as it is impossible to
lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard