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It is this secret contrariety of creative forces which produced the literary incompleteness, the licentious plays, the abortive drama of Dryden and Wycherly, the poor Greek importations, the gropings, the minute beauties and fragments of Ronsard and the Pleiad.
Perhaps it was the fact that the timbering was expensive and that his gropings for the lost ore body came to nothing; but in the back of his mind Blount's growing distrust dated from the day he had bought Wiley's quit-claim.
The steel mill, the battleship, the court of justice, the university these and the like of them are not accidents, nor miracles of individual invention, nor products of the vague longings and gropings of society in general. They are each the product of a brotherhood, of generations working to meet one social necessity, of an apostolic succession of masters living in the service of one ideal.
The solid studies which he had made, the reflective habits of his youth, the worship for classic models in which he had been educated, preserved him from losing his strength in blind gropings, in doubtful triumphs, as has happened to more than one partisan of the new ideas.
He has an age of play which is his apprenticeship; and he is formed unawares by a series of selective experiments, of curious gropings, while he is still under tutelage and suffers little by his mistakes. Had all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it might have been, nothing essential could have been learned afterward.
But how to get down to it was the question. They had grown bewildered in their gropings round about the summit, and knew not in which direction to go to regain the lost path.
Do not laugh too much at the hesitations, the countless gropings, the preposterous follies of this virgin mind, which a butterfly lifts to the clouds, to which grains of sand are mountains, which understands the twittering of birds, ascribes thoughts to flowers, and souls to dolls, which believes in far-off realms, where the trees are sugar, the fields chocolate, and the rivers syrup, for which Punch and Mother Hubbard are real and powerful individuals, a mind which peoples silence and vivifies night.
Quite naturally, too, the first gropings after a scientific theory of disease show a curious mixture of rationalism and superstition. Thus, in Greece, the temple hospitals devoted to the mythical Æsculapius, which were situated at Epidaurus, Pergamus, Cyrene, Corinth, and many other places, served as colleges, hospitals, and places of worship.
At the first glance the face seemed oddly and strikingly familiar; but when the young man marked the new-comer's entrance, the small hand-bag in which the amateur promoter carried his papers, and got up to shake hands, Ford found the suggestive gropings baffled. "My name is Adair," said the lounger genially; "and I suppose you are the Mr. Ford Uncle Sidney has been telling us about.
You never tell me what you are doing. How far has the play gone? I am not at all surprised that you don't understand my literary agonies. I don't understand them myself. But they exist nevertheless, and violent ones. I don't in the least know how to set to work to write, and I begin by expressing only the hundredth part of my ideas after infinite gropings.
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