he Machiavels
and Talleyrands. We do not learn how to love the world and savour
it with exquisite joy from the Whitmans and Emersons. What we do
is to struggle on, as best we may; living by custom, by prejudice, by
hope, by fear, by envy and jealousy, by ambition, by vanity, by love.

They call it our "environment," this patched up and piecemeal
panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and
thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted
amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions,
which drives us backward and forward from within. But there is
more in the lives of the most wretched of us than this blind struggle.

There are those invaluable, unutterable moments, which we have _to
ourselves,_ free of the weight of the world. There are the moments--the
door of our bedroom, of our attic, of our ship's cabin, of our
monastic cell, of our tenement-flat, shut against the intruder--when
we can enter the company of the great shadows and largely and
freely converse with them to the forgetting of all vexation.

At such times, it is to the novelists, to the inventors of stories, that
we most willingly turn for the poppied draught that we crave. The
poets hurt us with the pang of too dear beauty. They remind us too
pitifully of what we have missed. There is too much Rosemary
which is "for remembrance" about their songs; too many dead
violets between their leaves!

But on the large full tide of a great human romance, we can forget
all our troubles. We can live in the lives of people who resemble
ourselves and yet are not ourselves. We can put our own misguided
life into the sweet distance, and see it--it also--as an invented story;
a story that may yet have a fortunate ending!

The philosophers and even the poets are too anxious to convert us to
their visions and their fancies. There is the fatal odour of the prophet
in their perilous rhetoric, and they would fain lay their most noble
fingers upon our personal matters. They want to make us moral or
immoral. They want to thrust their mysticism, their materialism,
their free love, or their imprisoned thoughts, down our reluctant
throats.

But the great novelists are up to no such mischief; they are dreaming
of no such outrage. They are telling their stories of the old eternal
dilemmas; stories of love and hate and fear and wonder and madness;
stories of life and death and strength and weakness and perversion;
stories of l