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Searchology Directory 06
Page 08
But one has to ask oneself what exactly an imaginative man means by success, and what it is that attracts him in the idea of it. Putting aside the more obvious and material advantages,--wealth, position, influence, reputation,--a man of far-reaching mind and large ideas may well be haunted by a feeling that if he had entered public life, he might by example, precept, influence, legislation, have done something to turn his ideas and schemes into accomplished facts, have effected some moral or social reform, have set a mark on history. It must be remembered that a great writer's fame is often a posthumous growth, and we must be very careful not to attribute to a famous author a consciousness in his lifetime of his subsequent, or even of his contemporary, influence. It is undoubtedly true that Ruskin and Carlyle affected the thought of their time to an extraordinary degree. Ruskin summed up in his teaching an artistic ideal of the pursuit and influence of beauty, while Carlyle inculcated a more combative theory of active righteousness and the hatred of cant. But Ruskin's later years were spent in the shadow of a profound sense of failure. He thought that the public enjoyed his pretty phrases and derided his ideas; while Carlyle felt that he had fulminated in vain, and that the world was settling down more comfortably than ever into the pursuit of bourgeois prosperity and dishonest respectability.
No one can doubt but that this deposit of cave earth itself requires a prolonged time for its accumulation.<8> But this period, however prolonged, at length comes to an end. From some cause, both animals and man again abandoned the cave. Another vast cycle of years rolls away--a time expressed in thousands of years--during which nature again spread over the entombed remains a layer of stalagmite, in some places equal in thickness to the first formation. Above this layer we come to a bed of mold containing remains of the later Stone Age, of the Bronze, and even of the Iron Age. Below the first layer of stalagmite--the completed biography of Paleolithic times; above, the unfinished book of the present. Such are the eloquent results obtained by the thorough exploration of one cave. The results of all the other explorations, in a general way, confirm these. Mr. Dawkins explored a group of caverns in Derbyshire, England. These caverns and fissures are situated in what is known as Cresswell Crags, the precipitous sides of a ravine through which flows a stream of water dividing the counties of Derby and Nottingham.
If the European war, in its future consequences, should bring about certain modifications in the actual frontiers of one or the other of the Balkan States, the interest of Rumania requires that the Balkan equilibrium be established in accordance with the changes made to correspond with the purpose of maintaining the real equilibrium in its new form, no matter what the frontier lines will be in their final re-establishment. In connection with the attitude of Rumania in the presence of the European war no new decision has been taken. All the political parties are subjecting their attitude to the action of the Government. Mr. von Busch, the new Minister of Germany, has arrived and was received yesterday in confidence by King Charles.
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