f this experience, in consideration of some
interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not
identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real
claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in
the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in
him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung
about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal
disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the
interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his
previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement,
which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well!
we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of
death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont tous
condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then
our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness,
some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this
world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that
interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.
Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and
sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested
or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is
passion--that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied
consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty,
the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they
pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

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