whelming scheme for
squeezing him in--for keeping him squeezed in. He is mobbed on every
side. At school the teachers crowd round him and say "I" for him. At
home his parents say "I" for him. At church the preacher says "I" for
him. And when he retreats into the privacy of his own soul and betakes
himself to a book, the book is a classic and the book says "I" for him.
When he says "I" himself after a few appropriate years, he says it in
disguised quotation marks. If he cannot always avoid it--if in some
unguarded moment he is particularly alive about something and the "I"
comes out on it, society expects him to be ashamed of it, at least to
avoid the appearance of not being ashamed of it. If he writes he is
desired to say "we." Sometimes he shades himself off into "the present
writer." Sometimes he capitulates in bare initials.

There are very few people who do not live in quotation marks most of
their lives. They would die in them and go to heaven in them, if they
could. Nine times out of ten it is some one else's heaven they want to
go to. The number of people who would know what to do or how to act in
this world or the next, without their quotation marks on, is getting
more limited every year.

And yet one could not very well imagine a world more prostrate that this
one is, before a man without quotation marks. It dotes on personality.
It spends hundreds of years at a time in yearning for a great man. But
it wants its great man finished. It is never willing to pay what he
costs. It is particularly unwilling to pay what he costs as it goes
along. The great man as a boy has had to pay for himself. The bare feat
of keeping out of quotation marks has cost him generally more than he
thought he was worth--and has had to be paid in advance.

There is a certain sense in which it is true that every boy, at least at
the point where he is especially alive, is a kind of great man in
miniature--has the same experience, that is, in growing. Many a boy who
has been regularly represented to himself as a monster, a curiosity of
selfishness (and who has believed it), has had occasion to observe when
he grew up that some of his selfishness was real selfishness and that
some of it was life. The things he was selfish with, he finds as he
grows older, are the things he has been making a man out of. As a boy,
however, he does not get much inkling of this. He finds he is being
brought up in a world where boys who so little know how to pla