Chapter 27 - Page 2

his race and conquered life without the great social advantages he inherited, he had enjoyed power and pleasure to a degree that would have spoiled a coarser nature long since. True, the time had come when he had cared little for any of his endowments save as a means to great ends, when all his energies had concentrated in the determination to live a life of the highest possible usefulness--without which man's span was but existence--his ambitions had cohered and been driven steadily toward a permanent niche in history; then paled and dissolved for an hour in the glorious vision of human happiness.

And wholly as he might realize man's insignificance among the blind forces of nature, he could accept it philosophically and die with his soul uncorroded by misanthropy, that final and uncompromising admission of failure. The misanthrope was the supreme failure of life because he had not the intelligence to realize, or could not reconcile himself to, the incomplete condition of human nature. Man was made up of little qualities, and aspirations for great ones. Many yielded in the struggle and sank into impotent discontent among the small material things of life, instead of uplifting themselves with the picture of the inevitable future when development had run its course, and indulgently pitying the children of their own period who so often made life hateful with their greed, selfishness, snobbery--most potent obstacle to human endeavor--and injustice. The bad judgment of the mass! How many careers it had balked, if not ruined, with its poor ideals, its mean heroes, its instinctive avoidance of superior qualities foreign to itself, its contemptible desire to be identified with a fashion. It was this low standard of the crowd that induced misanthropy in many otherwise brave spirits who lacked the insight to discern the divine spark underneath, the persistence, sure of reward, to fight their way to this spark and reveal it to the gaze of astonished and flattered humanity. Rezanov's very arrogance had led him to regard the mass of mankind as but one degree removed from the nursery; his good nature and philosophical spirit to treat them with an indulgence that kept sourness out of his cynicism and inevitably recurring weariness and disgust; his ardent imagination had consoled itself with the vision of a future when man should live in a world made reasonable by the triumph of ideals that now lurked half ashamed in the high spaces of the human mind.

He looked back in wonder at the moment of wild regret and protest--the bitterer in its silence--when they had told him he must die; when in the last rally of the vital forces he had believed his will was still strong enough to command his ravaged body, to propel his brain, still teeming with a vast and complicated future, his heart, still warm and insistent with the image it cherished, on to the ultimates of ambition and love. How brief it had been, that last cry of mortality, with its