Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/14

 mocracy's chief interest. It is to our author's praise, again, that he sees this clearly and expresses it convincingly.

By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of himself. It reveals once more that tragedy—the most profound, most common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference permits—the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant, volitantes per ora virum, part of the very air one breathed—in the Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or