Page:Solo (1924).pdf/196

 were capable of taking into solution. One old man in particular interested Paul, a university professor whose pet theory was that Jean-Jacques Rousseau constituted a sort of head waters from which flowed all the streams of present-day literature, art, philosophy, education and national policy. He had written articles tracing Rousseau's influence on Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Danton, Tolstoi, Novalis, Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Wagner, and a dozen other men of genius.

Paul accompanied him one day to an exhibition of impressionistic paintings hoping that, for once, the theory would be left in the Garderobe with the walking-sticks, but no sooner were they inside the gallery than the professor began, "All this, lieber Freund, is foreshadowed in Rousseau. These impressionists feel they are unique in their feelings and must express this uniqueness by discarding rules. Jean-Jacques, you'll remember, said,  ' Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j ' ai vu.

The quotation brought Paul up with a start. Ever since he could remember he had been saying something quite like that to himself. Like Rousseau, and a whole world full of tiresome souls, he had been priding himself on the fact that he was unlike everybody else. Suddenly it seemed to him that there was no particular distinction in being unique. Certainly if uniqueness led to nothing more distinguished than the turning out of messy green, yellow and pink canvases there was little to be said for it. His reaction to writers like Nietzsche and Max Stirner had been a revulsion from superegoistic doctrines. Once more he saw the advantages of being a "quite ordinary boy."

On the other hand, he was oppressed by the swarm of people amongst whom he was moving; he often longed to retire into himself and "shut upon his retreat the floodgates of the world." Once, in the crowded, smoky atmosphere of a café, he caught himself under-