There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
24 February 2016
Here the Struggle Ends
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1923):