els
the loss, though he may not himself, for all his genius, be quite
aware of it. That Ruskin lived in moody isolation, while Shakespeare
caroused in an alehouse, does not prove Ruskin the greater man or the
deeper seer; it only shows that one knew how to achieve what the
other did not,--contact with the everyday, merry world, escape from
the awful and everlasting solemnity of life. Ruskin could not achieve
it for himself, he did not know how; but Bobbie, all unknown to either
of them, would have shown him. Bobbie would have made life for him
"sympathetically ridiculous," for Bobbie is a Penguin Person. And
Bobbie would have been a living, breathing human being, by his side
and ready to aid him, even to creep into his heart; not a stuffed
biped on a shelf in a musty museum. Poor Ruskin, how much life robbed
him of when it made it impossible for him to win in his youth the
careless, unthinking, but undying friendship of a few men like Bobbie,
a few Penguin Persons!

Ah, well! "The dice of God are always loaded." Doubtless we must
always pay for greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll. And
for our insignificance, in turn, come the Bobbies as reward. It
behooves those of us, then, who are insignificant, to appreciate our
blessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since we, when "the world
is too much with us," when the tyranny of economic conditions
oppresses and the wrongness of life seems almost more than we can
bear, have not that inward strength, that Titanic defiance, which is
the possession of the great, ultimately to fall back upon, and so
sorely need to be shown a joke somewhere, anywhere, in the universal
scheme, to find something that is "sympathetically ridiculous." That
is why the Penguin Persons are sent to us; thus we can see in them the
swing of the Emersonian pendulum.

But they are naturally modest, and doubtless have no idea of their
mission, further than to realize that "people are glad to have them
around," as Bobbie would express it, and that it is "up to them" (in
the same idiom) to be cheerful,--not a hard task, since cheeriness
sits in their soul. It is awful to think how self-consciousness might
ruin the flavor of their Penguinity if they ever were awakened to a
realization of the fact that they were involved in anything so serious
as the Law of Compensation! Though I do believe that David at his best
could make the eternal verities look ridiculous. No, when the Penguin
Persons do bec