The truth is that national life has to go on, and that very elaborate arrangements are made by statesmen and politicians for its administration.  But it is in reality very unimportant.  The wisest statesman in the world cannot affect it very much; he can only take advantage of the trend of public opinion.  If he outruns it, he is instantly stranded; and perhaps the most he can do is to foresee how people will be thinking some six weeks ahead.  But meanwhile the writer is speaking from the soul and to the soul; he is suggesting, inspiring, stimulating; he is presenting thoughts in so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has believed half a century before.  He must take his chance of fame; and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his dreams and visions as serenely and beautifully as he can.  The statesman has to argue, to strive, to compromise, to convert if he can, to coerce if he cannot.  It is a dusty encounter, and he must sacrifice grace and perhaps truth in the onset.  He may gain his point, achieve the practicable and the second best; but he is an opportunist and a schemer, and he cannot make life into what he wills, but only into what he can manage.  Of course the writer in a way risks more; he may reject the homely, useful task, and yet not have the strength to fit wings to his visions; he may live fruitlessly and die unpraised, with the thought that he has lost two birds in the hand for one which is not even in the bush.  He may turn out a mere Don Quixote, helmeted with a barber’s basin and tilting against windmills; but he could not choose otherwise, and he has paid a heavier price for his failure than many a man has paid for his success.

It is probably a wholly false antithesis to speak of life as a contrast to literature; one might as well draw a distinction between eating and drinking.  What is meant as a rule is that if a man devotes himself to imaginative creation, to the perception and expression of beauty, he must be prepared to withdraw from other activities.  But the imagination is a function of life, after all, and precisely the same holds good of stockbroking.  The real fact is that we Anglo-Saxons, by instinct and inheritance, think of the acquisition of property as the most obvious function of life.  As long as a man is occupied in acquiring property, we ask no further questions; we take for granted that he is virtuously employed, as long as he breaks no social rules:  while if he succeeds in getting into his hands an unusual share of the divisible goods of the world, we think highly of him.  Indeed, our ideals have altered very little since barbarous times, and we still are under the impression that resourcefulness is the mark of the hero.  I imagine that leisure as an occupation is much more distrusted and disapproved of in America than in England; but