Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/55

 and a gulf yawns between. There is evidence that this thing does happen. His past is no longer his; it has become a part of human history. It has become a dramatic spectacle; sitting in the box of his character he regards it as it were across footlights, with spectatorial detachment. He can re-examine it now without shame or vanity or repentance. It interests him no longer as conduct waiting for the Judgment Day but as food for intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. He now finds a use for his culture in understanding, not judging, the whole of the human spectacle. He wheels a speculative eye upon his coevals—those dreary "substantial characters" who now for so many years have been giving one another, as Thoreau complained, the same old bite of the same musty old cheese that they are. They, too, have become dramatic spectacles, each one with its own individual savour! And his wife and the four children? The moment that he stops worrying about that abstract line which is the shortest distance between two points, he perceives at last the full colour and fragrance and taste of his relation to them.

What does all this mean? It means that at forty, when a man seems hermetically enclosed in his character, an angel may just possibly unbar the door, and, leaving his possessive, aggressive body sleeping there, let his spirit out for the recognition and appreciation of a new life. So long as he wished to possess and direct the world, the world erected barriers against him, and progressively shut him in.