all the people in this hall, the people in the street outside, the people
of this country everywhere." And for a moment he was pleased; but soon
he began again to feel uneasy. "Since," he reflected, "it is necessary
for me to supply this hypothetical average human being with what he
wants, I shall have to find out how to distil him from all the
ingredients around me. Now how am I to do that? It will certainly take
me more than all my life to collect and boil the souls of all of them,
which is necessary if I am to extract the genuine article, and I should
then apparently have no time left to supply the precipitated spirit, when
I had obtained it, with what it wanted! Yet this hypothetical average
human being must be found, or I must stay for ever haunted by the thought
that I am not supplying him with what he wants!" And the writer became
more and more discouraged, for to arrogate to himself knowledge of all
the heights and depths, and even of all the virtues and vices, tastes and
dislikes of all the people of the country, without having first obtained
it, seemed to him to savour of insolence. And still more did it appear
impertinent, having taken this mass of knowledge which he had not got, to
extract from it a golden mean man, in order to supply him with what he
wanted. And yet this was what every artist did who justified his
existence--or it would not have been so stated in a newspaper. And he
gaped up at the lofty ceiling, as if he might perchance see the Public
flying up there in the faint bluish mist of smoke. And suddenly he
thought: "Suppose, by some miracle, my golden-mean bird came flying to me
with its beak open for the food with which it is my duty to supply
it--would it after all be such a very strange-looking creature; would it
not be extremely like my normal self? Am I not, in fact, myself the
Public? For, without the strongest and most reprehensible conceit, can I
claim for my normal self a single attribute or quality not possessed by
an hypothetical average human being? Yes, I am myself the Public; or at
all events all that my consciousness can ever know of it for certain."