ahead, weaving a commonplace thought or an ordinary cautious phrase into
an enchanted world, a crazy and heroic creed. The boy's soul, slumbering
and waking by fits and starts, had a puerile and mighty need of
optimism: to every idea in art or science thrown out to it, it would add
some complacently melodramatic tag, which would link it up with and
satisfy its own chimerical dreams.

As an experiment Olivier tried reading aloud to the boy on Sundays. He
thought that he was most likely to be interested by realistic and
familiar stories: he read him Tolstoy's _Memories of Childhood_.
They made no impression on the boy: he said:

"That's quite all right. Things are like that. One knows that."

And he could not understand why anybody should take so much trouble to
write about real things....

"He's just a boy," he would say disdainfully, "just an ordinary little
boy."

He was no more responsive to the interest of history: and science bored
him: it was to him no more than a tiresome introduction to a fairy-tale:
the invisible forces brought into the service of man were like terrible
genii laid low. What was the use of so much explanation? When a man
finds something it is no good his telling how he found it, he need
only tell what it is that he has found. The analysis of thought is a luxury
of the upper-classes. The souls of the people demand synthesis, ideas
ready-made, well or ill, or rather ill-made than well, but all tending
to action, and composed of the gross realities of life, and charged with
electricity. Of all the literature open to Emmanuel that which most