"And I saw the free souls of poets, The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me ...  O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not! ...  I will not be outfaced by irrational things, I will penetrate what is sarcastic upon me, I will make cities and civilizations defer to me This is what I have learnt from America—­

    I will confront these shows of the day and night
    I will know if I am to be less than they,
    I will see if I am not as majestic as they,
    I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they,
    I will see if I have no meaning while the houses and
        ships have meaning,

    ...  I am for those that have never been mastered,
    For men and women whose tempers have never been mastered,
    For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.

    I am for those who walk abreast of the whole earth
    Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all."_

CHAPTER I

THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO

I was spending a little time not long ago with a man of singularly devoted and noble spirit who had dedicated his life and his fortune to the Socialist movement.  We had had several talks before, and always with a little flurry at first of hopefulness toward one another’s ideas.  We both felt that the other, for a mere Socialist or for a mere Individualist, was really rather reasonable.  We admitted great tracts of things to one another, and we always felt as if by this one next argument, perchance, or by one further illustration, we would convince the other and rescue him like a brand from the burning.

The last time I saw him he started in at once at the station as we climbed up into the car by telling me what he was doing.  He was studying up the heroes of the American Revolution, and was writing something to show that they were not really heroes after all.  All manner of things were the matter with them.  They had always troubled him, he said.  He knew there was something wrong, and he was glad to have the matter settled.  He said he did not, and never had believed in heroes, and thought they did a great deal of harm—­even dead ones.  Heroes, he said, always deceived the people.  They kept people from seeing that nothing could be done in our modern society by any one man.  Only crowds could do things, he intimated—­each man, like one little wave on the world, wavering up to the shore and dying away.

As the evening wore on our conversation became more concrete, and I began to drag in, of course, every now and then, naturally, an inspired or semi-inspired millionaire or so.

I cannot say that these gentlemen were received with enthusiasm.

Finally, I turned on him.  “What is it that makes you so angry (and nearly all the Socialists) every time you hear something good, something you cannot deny is good, about a successful business man?  If I brought a row of inspired millionaires, say ten or twelve of them one after the other, into your library this minute, you would get hotter and hotter with every one, wouldn’t you?  You would scarcely speak to me.”