possesses himself of a half-forgotten and obscurely recorded
experience and rehabilitates and interprets it, is so complete that it
makes amplification superfluous.




Chapter IX.

Personality.


"It is undeniable," says Matthew Arnold, "that the exercise of a
creative power, that a free creative activity is the highest function
of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true
happiness." If this be true, and the heart of man apart from all
testimony affirms it, then the great books not only embody and express
the genius and vital knowledge of the race which created them, but
they are the products of the highest activity of man in the finest
moments of his life. They represent a high felicity no less than a
noble gift; they are the memorials of a happiness which may have been
brief, but which, while it lasted, had a touch of the divine in it;
for men are never nearer divinity than in their creative impulses and
moments. Homer may have been blind; but if he composed the epics which
bear his name he must have known moments of purer happiness than his
most fortunate contemporary; Dante missed the lesser comforts of life,
but there were hours of transcendent joy in his lonely career. For the
highest joy of which men taste is the full, free, and noble putting
forth of the power that is in them; no moments in human experience are
so thrilling as those in which a man's soul goes out from him into