so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and
what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has
believed half a century before. He must take his chance of fame;
and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the
consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his
dreams and visions as serenely and beautifully as he can. The
statesman has to argue, to strive, to compromise, to convert if he
can, to coerce if he cannot. It is a dusty encounter, and he must
sacrifice grace and perhaps truth in the onset. He may gain his
point, achieve the practicable and the second best; but he is an
opportunist and a schemer, and he cannot make life into what he
wills, but only into what he can manage. Of course the writer in a
way risks more; he may reject the homely, useful task, and yet not
have the strength to fit wings to his visions; he may live
fruitlessly and die unpraised, with the thought that he has lost
two birds in the hand for one which is not even in the bush. He may
turn out a mere Don Quixote, helmeted with a barber's basin and
tilting against windmills; but he could not choose otherwise, and
he has paid a heavier price for his failure than many a man has
paid for his success.

It is probably a wholly false antithesis to speak of life as a
contrast to literature; one might as well draw a distinction
between eating and drinking. What is meant as a rule is that if a
man devotes himself to imaginative creation, to the perception and
expression of beauty, he must be prepared to withdraw from other
activities. But the imagination is a function of life, after all,
and precisely the same holds good of stockbroking. The real fact is
that we Anglo-Saxons, by instinct and inheritance, think of the
acquisition of property as the most obvious function of life. As