"Yes."
"Oh, of course I admit the tares among the wheat; but such growths are mostly unsatisfactory. Forced fruit is never precisely the same as wild fruit."
"Why not?"
"Because, my boy, there is a self-consciousness about all forced things, and the hallmark of the Bohemian is an absolute ingenuousness."
"But to return to your example. Suppose the tare among the wheat had always recognized itself—had always craved to be a tare with other tares—until at length its roots spread and spread and passed beyond the boundary of the wheat-field! Why should it not flourish and lift its head among the weeds?"
"Because, boy, it would have its traditions. It might live forever among the weeds, it might flourish and reign over them, but it would have a reminiscence unknown to them—the knowledge of the years in which it strove to mold itself to the likeness of the wheat before rebellion woke within it. I know! I know! I know Bohemia—love Bohemia—but at best I am only a naturalized Bohemian. I can live on a crust with these good creatures, or I can send my gold flying with theirs, but I'm hanged if, for instance, I can sin in quite the delicious, child-like, whole-hearted way that is their prerogative! I have done most of the things that they have done, but their disarming candor, their simple joy in their exploits, is something debarred to me. It isn't for nothing, I tell you, that I have countless God-fearing generations behind me!"
He spoke jestingly, but his glance, when it met the eager impetuosity of the boy's, was quiet and observant.
"I disagree with you!" Max cried, suddenly. "I disagree with you wholly! Individuality has nothing to do with environment—nothing to do with ancestry."
"Ah, that's not logical! Humanity is only a chain of which we are the last links forged. I have had my own delusions, when I sent the ideal to the right-about and made realism my god, but as time has gone on my theories have gone back on me, and tradition has come into its own, until now I see the skeleton in every beautiful body, and the heart of me craves something behind even the bones—the soul of the creature."
"But that is different, because your desire and your theory have been the common desire and theory—the things that burn themselves out. My theory is not of the body, it is of the mind. I only contend that in all the greater concerns of life I am a being perfectly competent to stand alone."