which impel them to use different or diverse forms of expression; as if a
man were born to use only one limb and enjoy only one resource in this
many-sided universe!

Specialisation has been carried so far that it has become an organised
tyranny through the curiously perverted view of life which it has
developed in some minds. A man is permitted, in these days, to cultivate
one faculty or master one field of knowledge, but he must not try to live
a whole life, or work his nature out on all sides, under penalty of public
suspicion and disapproval. If a Pericles were to appear among us, he would
be discredited by the very qualities which made him the foremost public
man of his time among the most intelligent and gifted people who have yet
striven to solve the problems of life. If Michelangelo came among us, he
would be compelled to repress his tremendous energy or face the suspicion
of the critical mind of the age; it is not permitted a man, in these days,
to excel in painting, sculpture, architecture, and sonnet-writing. If, in
addition, such a man were to exhibit moral qualities of a very unusual
order, he would deepen the suspicion that he was not playing the game of
life fairly; for there are those who have so completely broken life into
fragments that they not only deny the possibility of the possession of the
ability to do more than one thing well, but the existence of any kind of
connection between character and achievement.

Man is not only a fragment, but the world is a mass of unrelated parts;
religion, science, morals, and art moving in little spheres of their own,
without the possibility of contact. The arts were born at the foot of the
altar, as we are sometimes reminded; but let the artist beware how he
entertains religious ideas or emotions to-day; to suggest that art and
morals have any interior relation is, in certain circles, to awaken pity
that one's knowledge of these things is still so rudimentary. The scholar