YA 
 
 WO ESSAYS ON 
 HE REMNANT 
 
 RY JOHN EGLINTON 
 
 ST 
 
 DUBLIN. WHALEY 
 
 46 DAWSON CHAMBERS 46 
 MDCCCXCIV. PRICE is. 6d.
 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Carey McWilliams
 
 TWO ESSAYS ON THE 
 
 REMNANT
 
 TWO ESSAYS ON 
 THE REMNANT 
 
 BY JOHN EGLINTON 
 
 DUBLIN. WHALEY 
 
 46 DAWSON CHAMBERS 46 
 MDCCCXCIV.
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Forte quid expediat communiter aut MELIOR 
 
 Maiis carer e quaeritis laboribus : 
 Nulla sit hoc potior sententia Phocaeorum 
 
 Velut profugit exsecrata ci<vitas 
 Agros atque lares patriot babitandaque fana 
 
 Apris reliquit et rapacibus lupis 
 Ire pedes quocunque ferent, quocunque per undas 
 
 Notus <vocabit aut protervus Africus. 
 Sic placet ? An melius quis babet suadere ? Secunda 
 
 Ratem occupare quid moramur alite ? 
 
 B91463
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 Vox CLAMANTIS i 
 
 THE CHOSEN PEOPLE AT WORK . . . .27
 
 PREFACE 
 
 "IT 7HILE the State was still on the rise of evolution, 
 ^ the motive from within, the impulse to go forward, 
 was supplied naturally and inevitably in the enthusiasm of 
 its young men. The approach to maturity was then more 
 of a crisis than at present, and was signalled by the 
 cropping-up in a youth of a crowd of elemental opinions, 
 sown by the Zeit-geist (word of fear !) and threatening, 
 like the hungry ears of corn, to eat up the kindly do- 
 mestic growth of affections and prejudices which were 
 nourished in the bosom of a good citizen. These wild 
 oats, however, as parents knew, meant little more than 
 that the young man was beginning to be a political 
 animal in earnest, or a man j and presently common-sense, 
 glittering perhaps upon him from its favourite seat in fair 
 female eyes, would warn him that he must approve his 
 virility some other way. He accordingly put his senti- 
 ments in his pocket, took stoutly to sword or ledger, suc- 
 ceeded, married, and soon had young Radicals of his own 
 to snub. We have changed all that. The Conservative 
 party, or that party which has no politics, is now mainly 
 ix
 
 recruited from the ranks of young men, who receive with 
 smiling sagacity the neanicisms of their elders. 
 
 Side by side with this remark on the hopeless conser- 
 vatism of our young men, we will note the gradual 
 drawing together, as to a common point of view, of the 
 children of this world and the children of light. In 
 religion, for instance, the maxims which make for 
 righteousness are but technically distinguishable from 
 those which will further a man in social and monetary 
 success; and the Church, which so often advertises in its 
 programme that very fact, seems now so inextricably 
 implicated with temporal conditions that it is hard to 
 conceive, not only how it could weather its transplanta- 
 tion, at the end of time, into eternity, but even how it 
 could survive any rude shock dealt to the social system. 
 As captive Greece led captive her rude conqueror in the 
 same sense have the people of God modified custom and 
 character of the children of this world, whose gay young 
 sparks twit their own kinsmen nowadays with ' Philis- 
 tinism.' And on their side the Chosen People, in the 
 midst of so much geniality, esprit, and distraction, have 
 for a long time waived any intention of setting forward 
 toward the promised land, and are now indeed suffering 
 even the tradition thereof to pass from their minds. 
 
 The sagacious Aristotle, in his consideration of a 
 'city,' or State, forbore to concern his fancy like Plato 
 with an ideal republic, but contented it with one which 
 should be a thorough success as much so as the republics 
 of the bee and the ant, which indeed seem to have sup- 
 plied him with several hints. The members of such a 
 State should consist, he said, of males, females, and 
 workers. Now, one deeply interesting vein of thought 
 x
 
 springs out of a chance reflection which detains him a 
 moment at starting. He cannot hide from himself that 
 human nature ramifies and develops strangely and un- 
 expectedly. Whatever arrangements his ingenuity can 
 devise are to be independent, he gives you to understand, 
 of two individuals, whom he names respectively the 
 'brute' and the 'god.' 1 If either of these, he feels, 
 should get into his city all may be retarded or upset ; and 
 accordingly, by implication, he from the outset excludes 
 them. Aristotle lived and wrote before the divine of 
 human nature had received so considerable an impetus 
 with the Christian era; otherwise he might have been 
 willing to face the contingency that a State may ever and 
 anon as it proceeds develop gods, or at least individuals 
 answering to his own definition. Quite possibly he would 
 have suggested some method of drafting them away (other- 
 wise than by hemlock) and detaching them, providing 
 them perhaps with some adequate and beneficent function. 
 As it is with us now, the presence together of the divine 
 and brutal in the social system brings about emergencies 
 for which he has made but little provision. London, the 
 most conspicuous city which human beings have yet done, 
 has not been a thorough success, as the social systems of 
 the bee and the ant are successes ; and although these 
 appear but small affairs in comparison with the superb 
 workings of London the tidal, irresistible stress of its 
 daily business and trikumia of its morning news-issue- 
 though they can show nothing to touch, say only, the 
 penny postage yet it is to those simple but venerable 
 
 1 His words are, 'Whoever is unable to join, or does not 
 need on account of self-sufficiency, forms no portion of a State : 
 since he is either a brute or a god.' 
 
 xi
 
 constitutions that prophet and philosopher, as they begin 
 to appear, direct, with their inscrutable smile, the Naamans 
 of civilization. 
 
 Yes, man is in general a political, a social animal, but 
 not so are gods ; whether because that is ' their nature,' 
 or by necessity, because there are not swarms or cities of 
 such. And as a mother rears up with all endearment her 
 children, only to see them at a touch of manhood detach 
 and stand off by themselves, yet is instructed to feel 
 satisfied ; so the State, the fairest and best appointed of 
 States, and the city compactly built together, brings forth 
 a few ' gods,' who depart from her and come not again, 
 even when sorrow comes upon her in her old age. Who 
 shall gainsay our doctrine of the Remnant, uttered alike 
 by solemn Jew, quick-glancing Greek, and haughty 
 Roman ? To thee therefore, London, mother also of 
 gods, hail ! We know not whom thou hast yet in 
 store ! 
 
 Sentiment du depart, cher a tons les hommes jeunes et 
 <vaillants ! Sentiment du depart guerrier ! But our Tyrtaeus 
 is some egregious Walt Whitman, celebrating with his 
 spasmodic inspiration untold disruption ; and there is 
 Tolstoi, our chief of men, calling upon the race to live 
 no more. Who is sufficient for these things ? Would 
 we not leap to the call of some truly magnanimous bard ; 
 or if one should come and reveal unto us, a pillar of cloud 
 by day and of fire by night, the cause of Idealism, would 
 we not follow whithersoever it should lead ? The perfect 
 call, we think, should have the perfect answer. Too 
 many people would be wrong, said Diderot, if Jean 
 Jacques were right ! But nowadays the Remnant having 
 ripened since then through a versicoloured bloom of art 
 xii
 
 and song, to the point of caducity one may perhaps 
 reverse the adjectives. Not in laughterous communities 
 must we inherit the earth now, but must drop away 
 silently and singly or, as Aristotle might have said, as 
 * gods ' obeying each his inward monition. For in 
 defect of a brazen-throated bard or the prophet's plague- 
 working wand, Necessity is a great ally. 
 
 Xlll
 
 VOX CLAMANTIS
 
 VOX CLAMANTIS 
 
 IT takes genius to be honest : hence the lies on 
 tombstones. Epitaphs, indeed, do not aim at 
 very much : and a false epitaph, to commemorate a 
 false life, has so much to be said for it. Even now, 
 that sombre-suited crowd of mourners, dispersing 
 swiftly, yet with subdued manners, toward the city, 
 have been discharging over the citizens whom they 
 abandon to morning and to me, a parting salute of lies. 
 De mortuis nil nisi bonum nay, I will let my 
 tongue wag a little now. What harm ? Besides, 
 when these people were alive one could say very 
 little, and there was very little to be said. They 
 were employed and we were Unemployed, they for- 
 tunate and we miserable, what then ? We but 
 wanted to be what they were. I have no doubt now 
 that, had they been in our place and we in theirs, the 
 facts would have rested objectively the same. Nay, 
 3
 
 rather say at once, these men were the fittest and we 
 the unfit. Yes, believe it, dear friends and brethren 
 in idleness, it was Nature's self who detached us from 
 that rude civic struggle, whose progress we cumbered 
 and still cumber. It was all a wretched misunder- 
 standing. If Providence seemed a fair-weather friend 
 and well-inclined only toward a working concern 
 like the general body of civic interests, what reason 
 lay therein for hating as we did these benevolent 
 bankers, these eupeptic merchants, mild parsons, un- 
 corrupt lawyers, and doctors with healing fingers ? 
 Why not accept a fact ? Fie on your bombs, ye 
 Anarchists ! That is a poor way of pilfering Nature's 
 pockets ! How far better, even perhaps from your 
 own point of view, to utilize that leisure which Pro- 
 vidence in its rigour affords you, to stand back and let 
 thought run into irrefragable generalizations, marking 
 from time to time amid the smoke loom up its own 
 portentous apparition, tending the furnace ! There 
 is compensation in all things, believe it. How well 
 I understand now the absurdity of my own mood 
 during those two dark years I spent in London, trying in 
 vain to catch on as a citizen. How clear now appears to 
 me the right of these men which I then questioned 
 to smile at my dark looks, which the passing sheen of 
 their tall hats in the sun was sufficient to fix upon them. 
 I had no business there and they had. But how could 
 I so long disguise from myself that truth ? The 
 reason was, that I had ceased to believe in Providence, 
 4
 
 which, indeed, at that time, and quite rightly, 
 would have nothing to say to me, while it quickened 
 their footsteps and added presumption to their gaze 
 and kept the mighty machinery of their daily life 
 clanging without mischance. For this strange thing 
 happened to me, that the humbler became, perforce, 
 my civic aspirations, the more exorbitant grew my 
 desire to re-establish my rapport with God and Nature. 
 So, one fine morning, in sheer despair I walked out of 
 London ; and that evening found me already far away 
 down a Western high-road, recovering my spirits at 
 every step. A planet, mistress of that season, hung 
 above my path ; and when the next morning dawned 
 I had deviated without knowing it into an unknown 
 land, full of meditative hollows, where I remained for 
 a summer, catching my food in the stream and sleep- 
 ing below the wood-pigeons. 
 
 Yet I began angrily and meant to be angry and 
 still mean to for I return now, halting in this 
 suburban cemetery, and if armed not with bombs but 
 with generalizations, that is only because I think I 
 can handle these better and with less risk to myself, 
 and because I have more confidence in them. That 
 momentary mood which overtook me was, perhaps, 
 something like what the poet figures 
 
 ' Pity, the violet on the tyrant's grave.' 
 
 For, say what you will of them, and let their epitaphs 
 
 display what sentiments they please, these men were 
 
 5
 
 tyrants, keeping up an obsolete system unreasonably, 
 depraving the clear ambitions of youth, corrupting 
 the poets, honouring false prophets, crucifying true 
 ones, audacious in cowardice, and armed with abuses. 
 Affection, ignorance, and fear compose the tyrant's 
 mood. Bound up with aged associations, blindfolded 
 to the truth, and abhorring the future, these men 
 were what they were. You are not wise, ye mer- 
 chants and magistrates, believe it. Yet what can you 
 do ? It may be, you can do nothing else. But be 
 assured, you are not wise. Misery is a great gene- 
 ralizer. Those cold regions in which the spirits of 
 the unsuccessful hover, precipitate thought in fractur- 
 ing phrases. Though we fail, have we not love, hope, 
 anger ? and if nothing but these, then must we arm 
 ourselves with these. 
 
 No, I cannot forget how they forced their concep- 
 tion of Providence on me with their dreadful formula : 
 To each his function ! and how confidingly I went 
 about looking for mine, wondering naively at all 
 times what it could be, till resigning myself at last to 
 the natural operation of despair, that little sluice 
 carried me down in no time to the sun-lit oceans of 
 Belief. As Keats says : 
 
 ' For that reason, that ye were the kings, 
 And only blind from sheer supremacy, 
 One avenue was shadow'd from your eyes, 
 Thro' which I wander'd to eternal truth.' 
 
 To confess the fact unashamed, I had begun to think 
 6
 
 I might eke out some small competency by the sale 
 of my ideas. I carried my glittering wares, at all 
 events, to some publishers and magazine-editors. It 
 was no brisk business, the ideal trade, yet the thing 
 had been done : and thus when some rare thought, 
 such as might have cheered Ezekiel, crossed me as 
 one would now and then it seemed here was a way 
 of rehabilitating myself with my landlady. The 
 middlemen just mentioned, however, declared to me 
 for the most part that the markets were flooded with 
 thoughts, and that the supply far outran the demand ; 
 besides, I need not say how reluctant to appear 
 are these shining essences when wanted for material 
 ends. 
 
 * Call no man happy till he dies ' I never called 
 you happy when you lived, not even when I envied 
 you. I had no idea but that when, having turned 
 my back on God (according to the saying) for six 
 years, I had caught on as a citizen, and become, who 
 knows ? the Dick Whittington of Idealism, I should 
 revert to the divine tradition and reach down ideas to 
 my fellow-citizens. The fact is, these men had 
 bullied me into thinking that character and truth 
 were two mutually exclusive departments of life. I 
 rebuked myself with the spectacle of London's 
 labours. I said, Had I but the mechanical force and 
 accuracy of these men, what a thing would the truth 
 be in me ! My attitude toward truth at that time 
 had some similarity to that of Colonel Lovelace 
 7
 
 toward Althea on going to the wars ' I could not 
 love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more ! ' 
 I had a friend in my beechen solitude who said, 
 when I consulted him on these matters, * It is 
 passion which instigates them ! * And turning the 
 pages of his book, he read, ' The senses and organs 
 are esteemed great, but the thinking self is greater 
 than they. The discriminating principle is greater 
 than the thinking self, and that which is greater than 
 the discriminating principle is He.' 
 
 Perhaps it may seem strange that I should take my 
 merry masters of last year as if they were all lying 
 here. Some of them perhaps are, and others no 
 doubt rent some of these vaults, thinking as little as 
 may be of their property once the insurance doctor 
 has passed them. My funeral oration, however, will 
 hold good over their cenotaphs. What though we 
 had them here indeed, we should then have their 
 names, their dates, and most likely a citation of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, the dates are not bad : 
 but there is this about dates, that they are by their 
 nature auxiliary to other interests ; by themselves, 
 we knew them before. The text, on the other hand, 
 well, it is not their own. What, citizen ! not a 
 verse, not a couplet has your life yielded you that 
 have been to school, as the Romans said, to learn 
 eloquence ? A heavy price the gods exact for citizen- 
 ship ! As for me and my companions, who will 
 be laid perhaps in some outlying tract of this place 
 8
 
 under green mounds less articulate than these lettered 
 slabs, or under the flowing sea, or in square penal 
 yards we will not all die, we will leave our gene- 
 ralizations behind us : the evil we have done will live 
 after us. This is a pauper's burial-ground in this 
 sense, that I question if one of these citizens will 
 have an obol to give Charon underground. As for 
 me and my companions, we will go down with our 
 generalizations in our mouths ; but that was too im- 
 palpable a coinage to press on their tongues at the ex- 
 treme hour. They had known, or thought they 
 knew, metal more attractive. A green mound above 
 the tiller of the soil is mutely eloquent, but here 
 surely is no adequate memorial or apologia for 
 citizens whose manner of life was so proud a super- 
 structure on the primitive conditions of life. There 
 is no hint of a mute inglorious Milton having 
 smouldered beneath that formalism ; and after all 
 would Milton have been Milton had he been mute ? 
 Far be it from me to deny our debt to our dead 
 ancestors. For one thing, it was their pleasant duty 
 to pass on to us the torch of life, for which we may or 
 may not feel ourselves obliged to them: but in any case, 
 accepting our being here, a more real debt remains 
 due to them for the great legacy of tradition and ten- 
 dency, where these are real, which survive in us to 
 prompt us : especially for that large river of speech, 
 which bears down upon our living souls the intimate 
 experience of every soul over which it has poured. 
 9
 
 For things such as these we cannot, I advise, too 
 highly thank and praise them : nor can we with fair- 
 ness blame them, my unemployed brothers, if they 
 have made no suitable provision for intelligent, though 
 incapable and supernumerary, descendants like our- 
 selves. If we are to succeed as a party we must de- 
 fine our position and formulate independent claims. 
 We must assume that the faculty of generalization, 
 appearing in us, denotes us as those with whom the 
 transmission of the eternal cell of human progress is 
 vested. We must assert that the true heirs are those 
 whose unchallenged birthright is truth ; and that 
 our civic supplanters have, it is true, a certain signifi- 
 cance and value collateral with ours, but that their 
 prosperity is detached and phantasmal they them- 
 selves, as we see, dropping dumbly one by one into 
 their tombs, and leaving not a rack behind. 
 
 But someone will say, ' Pray, not so fast ! These 
 men were indeed as you say "citizens," servants of a 
 great State, in which they played their part humbly 
 and quitted themselves like men. If you would find 
 fault with them because, when they came by on the 
 road, their neighbours cried, not, " There goes a man, 
 a living being ! " nor even, " There goes Armstrong, 
 or Smith!" but, "There goes the clergyman, the 
 doctor, the lawyer ! " or so forth, as if their humanity 
 were swallowed up in their civic capacity why 
 then, I ask, is this not something, that Armstrong, that 
 Smith, so insignificant and inarticulate merely as 
 
 10
 
 men or living beings, should stand on the other 
 hand for component units of one of those superb 
 communities which are advancing amid the indiffe- 
 rence of Nature from savagery to all excellence ? 
 These underlying considerations of man's divinity 
 and mystery come rarely uppermost. In the inter- 
 vals of functioning as citizens, Armstrong the clergy- 
 man and Smith the doctor may replenish themselves 
 with worship and science. But for the most part, 
 when you see them hurry by in the street, you need 
 not hesitate to call them, for all intents and purposes, 
 the doctor and the clergyman, and after their deaths 
 they may so be remembered.' 
 
 In answer to this, let us declare directly what has 
 hitherto been implied, that certain individuals, like 
 myself, who have done their best to catch on as 
 citizens, but failed, either because there was no 
 demand for their peculiar facility or because such 
 business as was offered them seemed a profanation of 
 their minds, cannot or will not surrender their 
 sympathies to that system of civilization in which, as 
 we say, Armstrong and Smith swink by day and 
 slumber by night so wholeheartedly. Smith may 
 feel without saying it how much more I should 
 love him if he would ! that the advance of civiliza- 
 tion is by a survival of the fittest, and that, in setting 
 me down, civilization leaves with me the contempla- 
 tion of the tireless renewals and transformations 
 toward which it sweeps Armstrong and him. Such, 
 II
 
 however, are by no means the thoughts which occupy 
 the idle clusters of the unemployed who desist at 
 length from catching at the skirts of progress. In 
 this survival of the fittest namely, such as Arm- 
 strong and Smith these others, the unfit, stand- 
 ing by, follow the fortunes of their naturally-selected 
 brethren with raillery and vituperation. To us 
 lapsed masses it appears that civilization, instead of 
 being a comprehensive commonwealth of all those 
 who are able and willing to work the solidarity of 
 thinking beings is becoming more and more of a 
 party ; and that the other party, our own, consisting 
 of the unfit and the unemployed not a respectable 
 one conventionally, yet having like Shylock hands, 
 organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions is 
 growing daily larger and more eminent. We declare 
 that civilization is advancing, in so far as it is doing 
 so, with a velocity acquired before it had begun to 
 discard the services of such persons as ourselves ; 
 and that since it has begun this it is gradually coming 
 to a standstill. The rapidity with which its wheels 
 are revolving is due, according to us, less to an 
 increase of applied human power than to a decrease 
 of solid work done for humanity. Even the generous 
 schemes of Socialists, or such an enthusiasm, say, as 
 that for a reformed spelling, and the like, presume 
 too much, in our opinion, on the notion of the 
 indefinite expansion of civilization. There is no 
 doubt that some of us speak, if not with authority, 
 
 12
 
 yet with the iteration of conviction : and such of us 
 as can still subsist for a while on the fag-ends of 
 wages and patrimonies remaining over in our pockets 
 have much leisure for sharpening our wits in reflec- 
 tion and reading. The best friends of the existing 
 order of things might indeed do well to hesitate a 
 little more than they do in turning off incompetent 
 or supernumerary hands, not knowing what gall 
 these incapable young men may secrete in adversity 
 nor what arms rage may find for them. 
 
 Man, as we know him, differs in this from the 
 lower animals, that whereas with them a number of 
 instincts exactly proportioned to their condition dis- 
 cover themselves from birth, he grows up a dreamy 
 boy, expecting a life of love, fame and happiness, 
 and when about a quarter of his journey through life 
 comes a rude fall with all his ideals, and goes the 
 rest of his way dissipating his attention with talk. 
 For a considerable time now men have accepted this 
 state of things, adapting to it their government and 
 religion, and whole method of life, so that the gene- 
 ral discontent might evaporate harmlessly in the 
 private cynicism and atheism of individuals, and 
 affect as little as possible the safeguards of society. 
 Nature takes sides against herself ; and one cannot 
 properly call these precautions any more unnatural 
 than those individual instincts which emerge so jubi- 
 lantly and perish so prematurely. In nature, how- 
 ever, matters converge now and then to crises 
 13
 
 human nature too has its thunderstorms : and no 
 doubt some decision will ultimately burst sponta- 
 neously among us upon this problem of whether the 
 nations, having chosen originally the path of least 
 resistance to common progress, are to continue to 
 force themselves forward artificially and against the 
 pleasure of the individual. Thus in modern Europe 
 we see the nations preserving the manners of barba- 
 rians and threatening one another with long Homeric 
 preambles across their channels and mountain-bar- 
 riers, while the best persons in each nation are find- 
 ing the best range for their true activities in a life of 
 thought. Instead of being incredibly superior to 
 each of its units the State is now centuries behind- 
 hand. War must henceforth be a knocking together 
 of these old bottles to break them. 
 
 Civilization has in its start and growth the natural 
 and inevitable beauty of a plant, or a girl ; but when 
 its charms are going and it has to maintain its bloom 
 and contours with rouge and heaven knows what, 
 the Rousseaus and Tolstois break away from it saying 
 coarse things. In the time of Chaucer the English 
 nation is as fair as a rosebud, and its poets babble of 
 spring : but a couple of centuries later, when Queen 
 Elizabeth was pondering whether she could not in 
 some way restrain London's further growth, its ex- 
 panded petals were falling away in a shower of 
 dramas and epics. * Nothing is perfect,' as the 
 French financier Necker observed, 'except for a 
 
 H
 
 moment.' A city is nature's doing, and London her 
 hugest flower by the river's brim, but primroses are 
 preferable when London begins to run to seed. 
 . Nothing could possibly restrain communities from 
 coagulating into cities, where comfort will in time 
 engender delight, delight thought, thought discon- 
 tent and disintegration. To call civilization a failure 
 will not help us very much. Of course it is a 
 failure : not, however, because it is a scheme 
 erected by man in the teeth of nature, but because 
 nature is no longer in it as a coherent whole. She 
 subsists nevertheless, and with concentrated energy, 
 in the individual, who drops away and rolls off by 
 by himself to the wood or the seashore with a swell- 
 ing potentiality of thought in his bosom. What 
 disgusts the Rousseaus and Tolstois in our present 
 vacillating conduct is not, so to speak, that we have 
 gone to sea in a ship, but that when the ship has 
 foundered we cling to the doomed hulk instead of 
 saving ourselves on the spars that ride the waves 
 around it, and getting to the green valleys that shine 
 through the mist. It is the way of ships of State 
 thus to founder at the last moment within sight of 
 shore, yet in such a way that no hands need be 
 lost. 
 
 Civilization ceases to be a good thing with the 
 
 belief in God, as the Neckers and Gladstones know. 
 
 When men are growing up in a community they 
 
 recognize the tendencies on which they are advanc- 
 
 15
 
 ing, and to deviate from these tendencies, to refuse 
 homage to Aphrodite or Apollo, seems an impious 
 and fatal folly. When men have already grown, 
 however, these tendencies are no longer manifest or 
 efficient in their lives, and some teacher starts up 
 with the announcement that all this time the King- 
 dom of God has been germinating within them a 
 joyous discovery to as many as receive it. The con- 
 ceptions of single men become then as great as the 
 racial traditions. No one who has grasped the con- 
 ception that the part repeats the whole will assent to 
 the permanent subordination of the individual to an 
 outward institution. 
 
 The test of the state of civilization is therefore 
 quite simple whether in assisting it the individual is 
 astride of his proper instincts. If in gratifying his 
 deepest and truest inclinations he is subserving the 
 general end, then of that civilization it may be said 
 that it is growing and prospering, and that Nature is 
 in it. When, on the other hand, a man does some 
 violence to his own nature in adhering to the parent 
 bulk ; when its character and aspirations are not 
 repeated in him ; when his duty to himself runs 
 counter to his outward obligations ; when the com- 
 ponent parts of the State, its institutions, must have 
 mainstays passed round them to hold them together ; 
 when the family is no longer the State in miniature, 
 and woman demurs to what is expected of her ; when 
 the populace breaks over its natural barriers ; when 
 16
 
 the faculty of building ceases ; when the Ideal and 
 the Practical seem mutually antagonistic, and the 
 youth must crush his genius into his cleverness if he 
 will catch on as a citizen, then of that State it may 
 be said that its day, as a State, is over ; that nature is 
 no longer in it ; and that endless disintegration is its 
 portion. Look at some youthful city compactly built 
 together, rising abrupt on the plains of which she is 
 mistress I mean no Utopia nor ideal republic, but 
 simply a young barbaric town that one may fancy. 
 From the engirdling walls to the threatening citadel 
 every heard is kindled : there is noise of cutting 
 and chopping and grinding, a bee-like susurration of 
 homogeneous employment ; the sun-lit smoke is this 
 city's breath, drawn freely from lungs nowhere de- 
 crepit. The young men exercise in the fields, the 
 old men sit in council, and at sunset the daughters 
 leap down the street to the dance. Look upon that 
 picture, then upon this. No foe from without has 
 availed to burst the walls of that town, but excess of 
 life, sun-nurtured, has broken them from within. 
 The city has overthrown its boundaries and poured 
 out upon the plain, its outlines are gone, it is form- 
 less. Ask these people where they live, and they will 
 give you the name of that ancient city. But they no 
 longer live there they are a stationary horde. Why 
 not begin to move away ? ' Ah,' say many who 
 would not consciously acknowledge themselves slaves 
 to their fellow-men, ' London is a great tyrant ! ' 
 17 c
 
 There it is ! Yet does it not occur to these myriads 
 that the thing which they serve is a figment : that 
 London is Londoners ? 
 
 One pretty certain indication of a reversion to 
 barbarism already begun in Europe is the cropping up 
 amongst our civic brethren of what is called the 
 ' Woman's Question.' Henceforth, when we see 
 among the barbarian inheritors of lapsed civilizations 
 the women doing the men's work, we will know that 
 this is probably the woman's choice and claim in time 
 past, when, as with our brethren, their civilization 
 was beginning to topple over. After man has for 
 centuries been doing his utmost for woman, given 
 her leisure, comfort, and security, and asked nothing 
 in requital but her smile ; expended incredible 
 labour, resource, and ingenuity, in procuring her the 
 soft life which her temperament demands ; sunk 
 myriads of lives in the guarantee and maintenance of 
 the security of the home which she requires and loves 
 women are now, at the crowning moment, about 
 to spoil the whole situation by what is apparently a 
 capricious and ungrateful refusal of his services. 
 Cushions and carpets, the steam-engine and the tele- 
 graph none of these advantages would have been 
 thought of but for the incentive and provocation of 
 her smile; and man made them not one of them 
 did woman make for herself. For her sake he aban- 
 doned the prairie and the hill-side, the joys of the 
 hunt and of the flood, and in low-lying plains 
 18
 
 subjected his intelligence to king and priest. The 
 desire of the male, conscious or implicit, to please 
 and gratify the female, is the mainspring in the 
 working out of civilization : without chivalry, civili- 
 zation is a watch unwound. In the midst of that 
 comfort in which they live and move, which man 
 got for them, and which they retain, certain women 
 of the more fortunate classes are beginning to hint 
 that they can now get on tolerably well by them- 
 selves. If it were a daring and an heroic rejection of 
 him, as because he was not worthy, then, indeed, this 
 spectacle would be grand and poetic, even if tragical 
 to our civic friends : if we saw these women coming 
 forth into the wilderness to endure suffering and 
 privation rather than misunderstanding and wrong, we 
 should see also, assuredly, male spirits nobly matched 
 with theirs. But it is not so. They have no wish or 
 intention to lose hold of such advantages as their 
 prestige has brought them. Not one delicacy will 
 they let go neither soft-lined houses, nor costly 
 raiment, nor the long lamp-lit dining-table, nor the 
 frequently-arriving post, nor new books. They fling 
 not from their bosoms the pearls for which man has 
 groped the seas. And man, knowing well that if he 
 has sinned in time past they have sinned with him, 
 and looking half remorsefully upon them, feels half 
 disposed to relinquish to them the ' rights ' which 
 have begun to grow meaningless and valueless to 
 himself. * Yes,' he will say presently, ' you may 
 
 '9
 
 sit in the House of Commons if you like ! ' Thus 
 is woman coming in with the Chinee : and our 
 civic brother, not with complacency but with resigna- 
 tion, makes way to her. 
 
 I own that in assailing, with the best intentions in 
 the world, the social system, I am repeatedly em- 
 barrassed by the thought of those excellent citizens, 
 my friends. None of these good kind people seem 
 anything like the monster which they help to com- 
 pose. The good old clergyman, my uncle, with his 
 countless untold charities, bore no resemblance to 
 that corrupt hypocrite, his prototype, the symbol of 
 ecclesiastical tyranny. The merchants I have known 
 were no such bloodless machines as that figment of 
 my spleen, the money-grabber : they listened to the 
 tales of mendicants, in whose faces, had I possessed a 
 door, I should have slammed it. How willingly, then, 
 would I not have dealt with them as I knew them 
 my fathers and brethren ; but the social system with 
 which their lives and energies were implicated has 
 compelled me to deal with them in the gross. And 
 indeed I must add that when one had chanced 
 to rub them the wrong way, certain instincts were 
 often ready to reveal a repetition of the whole in the 
 part. 
 
 But now, if without bitterness I turn once again 
 to London, on a mere trivial quest, yet half eager to 
 hear again, though that dull banausic murmur of 
 20
 
 a million chariots, the stifled music of humanity ; 
 and if, beholding the prolonged decay of that great 
 celandine, I can mutter free from spleen, 
 
 ' This neither is its courage nor its choice, 
 But its necessity in being old ' 
 
 to whom do I owe it but unto thee, mild light of the 
 nineteenth century, whose name was as a far-flutter- 
 ing unattainable carol to me in my prison, thou first 
 and greatest of the Unemployed ! first-fruits with us 
 of civilization, as Shakspeare with all his gay com- 
 peers was the full blossom ! How little shall it irk 
 me now, an oblique criticism out of the Londoner's 
 shallow brown eye ! How much more respectable, 
 I shall consider with myself, in any true sense of the 
 word, is an old coat than a new ! To one how 
 much more truly than to the other doth hang a tale ! 
 All things in nature deck themselves out of the pride 
 and elation of individuality : the Londoner alone 
 dresses to avoid notice. I shall bethink me that I 
 am free, and advertise my vagrancy, nor too softly 
 compassionate my busy scorners. With an eye 
 stored with memories of my lonely roads, I will 
 peruse the system whose strings their movements 
 keep pulling. Were it something consistently 
 grandiose, did the details not fall so deplorably be- 
 hind the general idea, the philosopher might over- 
 come his repugnance and subordinate himself with 
 this glossy mob. But from a broad acquiescence in 
 
 21
 
 the social system it seems but a step to an acquies- 
 cence in convention and its 1,001 curious infeli- 
 cities : an acquiescence in tall hats and the insane 
 apologetic behaviour of civilized men toward one 
 another ; in the right of overlings to demand from me 
 my costly morning hours, which I should deliver up 
 and hear nothing more of them. If acquiescence 
 meant simply, say, for the philosopher, as for Israel 
 in Egypt, the moulding of so many bricks per day, 
 with or without straw, a simple homogeneous task 
 like that, how willingly would I lend a hand ! what 
 absolutely conscientious bricks I should turn out ! 
 assimilating into the rigorous concatenation of the 
 thoughts which I could meanwhile pursue even the 
 abrupt sensation now and then of the taskmaster's 
 scourge. My hand I can give, willingly enough, 
 but my mind I grudge : and it is my mind which 
 Convention would seal for her own with a tall hat. 
 I will think once again, as I thought often in my 
 misery, of that raw North-country youth, who, a 
 century ago, seeking like myself to catch on as 
 a citizen, walked up and down in London its multi- 
 tudinous houses taking a certain splendour at that 
 time in the ruddy sunsets of the French Revolution 
 era. A completely mild and innocuous thing it 
 seemed, that strange rapture to which this young 
 man was liable in his walks : and the quick-eyed 
 citizens of London doubtless glanced, after the 
 manner which still obtains with them, at his hat and 
 22
 
 boots, rapidly deducing how much there might be to 
 be reckoned with between these extremities from the 
 condition in which they, the outworks of the per- 
 sonality, were kept. And could their sharp eyes have 
 pierced to his mind they would have found for the 
 most part the healthful vacuity of a mind at ease, 
 traversed ever and anon by tender breeze-like 
 memories and imaginations of a happy childhood 
 spent amid the distant mountains. Here, the most 
 irrelevant figure in Cheapside, he catches the song of 
 a captive thrush at the corner of Wood Street, and 
 forthwith these imaginations that attend him throng 
 upon him : 
 
 ' Bright volumes of vapour thro' Lothbury glide, 
 And a river runs on thro' the Vale of Cheapside ! ' 
 
 Seize him, ye Londoners ! It is a treachery ! He is 
 no Gallic emissary, but worse ! He is in league 
 with the green hosts of trees, whose patient barbaric 
 siege ye have put back so long from year to year, 
 and of the countless horde of grass that springs in 
 the breaches of ruins and in the interstices of de- 
 populate pavements ! He has been reared among 
 them, and he has not forgotten the friends of his 
 youth. They have crooned him into infant sleep 
 with their murmurings, bewitching him. And now 
 he is glamoured and sees not the hurrying people who 
 jostle him ; he exults no longer in citizenship, and 
 the flush of patriotism is withered within him : he 
 exults in the green light beneath trees, or in blue
 
 glimpses of woodland water. Already he sees, or 
 thinks he sees, his hermitage by the lake shore. Yet 
 the young man is able-bodied enough, with no 
 physical defect such as in Sparta would have decided 
 the magistrates to expose him as soon as born : and 
 but for that primal glimpse of Nature Einosiphyllos 
 - tremulous with leaves which has unsettled him, 
 there might be the makings of a bishop in him, as 
 there were in his brother, or, who knows ? of a Lord 
 Chancellor. It is just this indeed which makes his 
 defection so significant as it must be regarded, that a 
 latent Lord Chancellor, or bishop, or other eminent 
 citizen, should thus go off by himself, maundering as 
 it seemed, about sunsets and wayside flowers, other- 
 wise than in a temperate pastoral style. Certainly, 
 London is no place for the indulgence of such moods 
 as the London reviewer said a little later : * Notions 
 like those of Mr. Wordsworth are evidently suited 
 only to a life purely contemplative.' And after he 
 was already gone a good while, far from Cheapside 
 and the corner of Wood Street, and London was pub- 
 lishing, for a consideration, his ' call you 'em stanzos, 
 shepherd ? ' and the clever reviewer already quoted 
 was instituting a comparison between him and 
 Rousseau of whom he was indeed the more quiet 
 though perhaps no less effective English counterpart, 
 that became a little more apparent which we have 
 been hinting at, that his mood was catching, and 
 that the old charge brought against the. idealist 
 24
 
 Socrates of corrupting the youths, in the sense of 
 indisposing them for civic action, might have been 
 made good against this man. For many young men 
 who might have otherwise served the State well, 
 have been unsettled and perverted through that 
 initial treachery of Wordsworth. Benjamin Franklins 
 and Dick Whittingtons are not reared on such stuff 
 as ' Tintern Abbeys ' and ' Odes on Immortality ' 
 are made of. Nay, we will not emphasize unneces- 
 sarily the individuality of Wordsworth : if it had not 
 been he no doubt it would have been another, and 
 he himself had acted quite innocently in the matter ; 
 but that Wordsworthian rapture, with all the mystic 
 elements it held in solution, has since permeated 
 all idealism. No genuine child of light but is liable 
 now to sudden visitations from the wilderness 
 fallings from him, vanishings, illuminative misgivings, 
 and the skirts of transcendent hopes. And once the 
 wilderness has breathed upon him, it claims him 
 more and more for itself. If he plead duty, the 
 wisdom with which he is in new communion smiles : 
 and he recognizes with a kind of exultation like 
 some nymph singled out of old by the eye of 
 Heaven that he must yield in the end. More and 
 more the dull round of civic duties irks him, and his 
 soul must spring forth in the end to that which 
 woos it to its own fulfilment. Meanwhile, has not 
 the face of London itself suffered a change since 
 that tall North-country youth walked its streets
 
 the first of them that are idle and the hot young 
 poets who followed in his footsteps ? Has it not 
 suffered green invasions of the passive trees in many 
 a broad place where they wave, as though London 
 were their Carthage against which they had sworn 
 that it must be destroyed Delendum est Londinium ? 
 Does not the noisy inundation of the surrounding 
 country on bank-holidays indicate some yeasty in- 
 gredient of London life ? Has not the civil war 
 between Labour and Capital been embittered in a 
 sense more acute of what civic poverty misses in 
 life ? Is not street-music a wailfuller cry ? Are not, 
 in one word, the cheerful times of Dick Whittington 
 gone forever ? 
 
 26
 
 II 
 
 THE CHOSEN PEOPLE AT 
 WORK 
 
 CIVILIZED man is once more a savage : but he 
 is not as if civilization had never been. He 
 is no longer what he was when the failure within 
 him of his ruder instincts left him social and 
 stationary. He has now left his barbaric ennui 
 behind him, and with a full heart turns once more 
 to nature, his home and his mother. He can once 
 again pitch his tent where he will and acknow- 
 ledge no bonds. He is as one who goes forth 
 into the morning woods, in whose brain yet flaunt 
 the pomps and processions of his dreams. At every 
 step he is delighted, and at every breath invigo- 
 rated. He finds the forest deserted by his old 
 foes, and the long grass free from snakes. His 
 own appetite is not so robust and depredatory as 
 formerly. Nature no longer tempts and disciplines 
 him, but is quite old and submissive to her grown 
 child. He carries no more a javelin or a bag of 
 bullets. His desires are few, and he has no longer 
 29
 
 any quarrel. He is at peace with nature, with his 
 brethren, and with himself. ' His mind to him a 
 kingdom is.' 
 
 He is no longer a barbarian. Those hands, folded 
 now demurely as he passes on into the woods, a sun- 
 flecked shadow, have never rested throughout that 
 long dream from which he is awakened. They have 
 reared him pyramids, temples, and cathedrals. Then 
 he abstracted from nature her colours, and contrived 
 himself a world with no grosser admixture. Finally 
 with words he built up a world, in which form and 
 colour were repeated as in a lake the mountains 
 around it. Form, colour, and substance of the world 
 he has now by heart, and his hands are folded while 
 he meditates. The world is covered with the wrecks 
 of his dream. The pyramid lies half sunken in the 
 sands ; the temple turns yellow on capes of Greece ; 
 the cathedral is a grey presence above the trampling 
 and trundling of the town ; within, pictures glow 
 from the roof. Poetry alone, the final art, survives 
 fragmentarily in the slow settling of his mind to 
 contemplation. 
 
 The desire of the wilderness, which, at the period 
 of the French Revolution, welled up in the mind of 
 the Wordsworthian poets and disturbed them with 
 joy, and which has remained the uncloying theme of 
 all poets, meant something more than an innocent 
 love of wild flowers and clear mountain air. That 
 is something more than an imaginative yearning 
 30
 
 with which the child of modern civilization follows 
 with his eye the flight of the sea-bird, or breaks into 
 utterance in the woodland. Wordsworth's song was 
 the still small voice heard out of the tumult of that 
 era. Simultaneously with all true individual deve- 
 lopment recurs the passion for nature and for the 
 freedom of solitude. What did nature mean by 
 these promptings but that the chosen people should 
 obey her voice and go forth into the wilderness ? 
 And however soft and persuasive her voice, yet will 
 nature be obeyed : and disobedience entails so much 
 trouble. For why is it better, at each climax of 
 civilization, that the chosen people should be gone ? 
 Because, while remaining in a system of things in 
 which they have no longer any real concern, they 
 are an anomaly in nature : for once man is glamoured 
 with the thought of the wilderness he becomes in- 
 different. He is no longer a good citizen, and he 
 infects with his indifference those who should be so. 
 What has he to do with the State who cares nothing 
 what laws are promulgated, what party is trium- 
 phant, what nation is shamed ? The love of his 
 country is merged in the love of the life-giving sod. 
 His ideas, which concern himself alone, are taken 
 and applied prematurely and generally. What 
 means this precocious discontent with institutions, 
 sacred and profane, but a loose idealism caught from 
 the reckless talk of the Chosen People so to name 
 that curiously situated class of Idealists, who, as 
 31
 
 Israel took over the brick-manufacture of Egypt, 
 have in this century been taking over the manufac- 
 ture of literature, and through it been directing 
 politics and a society in which they have no longer 
 any natural concern. Had those natural prompt- 
 ings, above described, been followed by the appari- 
 tion of some modern equivalent to Moses and 
 Aaron, and the peaceable withdrawal of idealists 
 into the wilderness, there would have been no 
 oppression in store for them and no uneasy dreams 
 for the Pharaoh of civilization. The French Revo- 
 lution was only the first of the great plagues. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment where we stand. A 
 great literary period such as the nineteenth century 
 opens with a joyous outburst of song, individual life 
 rising buoyant on the wave of national life, and a few 
 glad voices cresting with utterance the secular move- 
 ment. Such voices were Goethe and Schiller in 
 Germany ; Wordsworth, Shelley, and others, in Eng- 
 land. A studious lull ensues, and then comes a 
 period of a more varied and ampler utterance, dis- 
 tinguished not alone by that early enthusiasm, but 
 enriched and enlarged through the ensuing interval 
 of general culture : this is the period of art and 
 criticism, still upborne on the flowing tide of national 
 life ; in the Victorian era it has been the period of 
 the idyll, the essay, the novel. At present we see 
 that taking place which has taken place at the close 
 of all similar epochs the Periclean, the Augustan. 
 32
 
 The tide of national life sets to ebb, and the general 
 impulse of development subsiding with it, idealists 
 inevitably divide into two classes those who con- 
 tent themselves with maintaining a decadent litera- 
 ture, art, and science, and those who feel prompted 
 to perpetuate the onward impulse in their own indi- 
 vidual lives. If in the previous epoch individual life 
 finds ample scope in culture, observation, and pro- 
 duction, it now casts about to discover and further 
 in itself a power which will enable it to live in and 
 by itself. It is an aspiration which may bring 
 inarticulateness and ineffectuality into the lives of 
 those who embrace it ; but such as it is, it is a real 
 thing, an innate impulse of the mind, and the few 
 who elect to live by it are alone fulfilling the condi- 
 tions of existence at that point of time. Those who 
 do so are the Remnant. They are not unhappy, as 
 the conventional suppose, but happy as those who 
 are in love or fulfilling nature's purposes in any other 
 way. The inheritor of nineteenth century culture 
 seeks in his better moments no further inducement 
 than that questioning impulse which works in his 
 mind, as it worked in the minds of the Stoic inheri- 
 tors of Greek and Roman culture. This it is with 
 which he shall go forth and conquer. Behind him 
 falls away the latest efflorescence of art and song, 
 but in his seeming rejection of it he carries its seed 
 into the future, the potentiality of new intellectual 
 eras : for here is the paradox of the situation, that 
 33 D
 
 with this Remnant, which seems to cut itself adrift 
 from all progress, the eternal cell of human progress 
 is lodged. Cast off, as it were, from the parent 
 stem, fertilization ensues in the individual mind 
 through that which Plato described as the assimila- 
 tion of truth : ' What birth is to existence, belief is 
 to truth.' So surely as there is an epoch of utter- 
 ance, of imagination, of culture, it is followed by 
 one of assimilation, asceticism, belief. Ideas which 
 in the previous epoch have been adequately mani- 
 fested and expressed in art and criticism begin then 
 to take on the nature and semblance of doctrine, and 
 the terms of religion which relate to a radical change 
 in personality come into force : * Ye have sown, 
 now you must reap ; ' ' If ye know these things, 
 happy are ye if ye do them.' The impulse of 
 criticism, to see things as in themselves they really 
 are, yields, when satisfied, to contemplation, which 
 aspires to receive into the individual life the 
 irrefragable and immortal quality of ideas them, 
 selves. 
 
 And yet our doctrine of a Chosen People, for whom 
 the time is come that they should go forth into the 
 wilderness and build the City of God, may appear, to 
 say the least of it, a little crude. It might be thought 
 that the existence of a Chosen People, of a tribe 
 of idealists, in the heart of civilization, is an unmixed 
 advantage for both it and them : that they, on their 
 side, find there material on which to operate, stuff 
 34
 
 with which to cope, while, on the other side, the State 
 is continually renovated and quickened through the 
 abode within it of such a tribe. And up to a certain 
 point this is true. The ripening in a nation of the 
 children of light to a Chosen People is the ripening 
 too of that nation. When wisdom and foresight 
 appear in a citizen he inevitably becomes, like Joseph, 
 the adviser of Pharaoh. And literature what con- 
 ceivable reason is there for its existence but the 
 elevation of mankind ? It is indeed no mean advan- 
 tage for a State to have a Milton or a Bacon among 
 its citizens. Whatever of grace and of spiritual im- 
 pulse appears in a State, springs from the abode 
 within it of a Chosen People. Yet there comes a 
 time when the Chosen People and the State, if either 
 are to fulfil the conditions of their existence, must 
 take different ways when Moses, or in our own 
 time Thoreau, Whitman, Tolstoi, and others, appear, 
 to call them forth to build in the wilderness the City 
 of God. That is the period when the external appli- 
 cation of ideas is become impossible, when the pro- 
 gress of the State comes to a standstill, when all de- 
 velopment is individual and a Remnant is formed. 
 Come forth, say then these prophets, you that 
 believe or have good hope, ye have sown, now you 
 must reap ! Come forth, you that are quickened 
 with that most ancient and most modern faculty by 
 which men enjoy themselves ! As your strength lan- 
 guishes without toil, so your wills languish without 
 35
 
 belief! Come forth and inherit your ideas, and live 
 the great life beneath sun and moon ! 
 
 In the present case it was less Pharaoh who would 
 not let the Chosen People go than the Chosen People 
 who have wished to remain. For whereas up to this, 
 idealists had followed their proper task mostly for 
 their private gratification and as a parergon and 
 even that, a little earlier, with one eye on the stake 
 and the torture-chamber there was now, as one re- 
 sult of the French Revolution, a huge demand 
 created for ideas themselves all the world over. And 
 whereas in Egypt the Chosen People had shown an 
 available dexterity in brick-making, it was now mainly 
 their skill in writing for which a use was found : 
 a facility of theirs which has been found to fit in 
 so well that in the course of the century they have 
 been taking over almost all the literary work which 
 crops up in an advanced stage of civilization. The 
 pen indeed seems to grow to the hand of an idealist, 
 to carry his slender finger like an Arab horseman 
 over the silent plains of foolscap. Take anyone else 
 and set him down to write : he will botch and hesi- 
 tate where your born literary man, in a trice, will 
 have whipped his thoughts into their due places, 
 as if really thoughts were the material with which 
 nature had best fitted him to cope. And in an age 
 when facilities count for so much, this facility of the 
 literary man with thoughts has suggested to those 
 powers who control the reins of affairs, the with- 
 36
 
 drawal of him from tasks which others can do as well 
 as he brick-making and so on and special licensing 
 of him, as it were, to work according to his aptitude 
 in thoughts, under wisely concessive supervision : to 
 mould verses and build the lofty rhyme according to 
 his liking. In this capacity, then, of thought- 
 artisans, or, speaking generally, artists and critics, it is 
 that the chosen people have remained within the 
 civil jurisdiction, and gradually swollen to what 
 we have called that curiously situated class of Literary 
 Men, who, in virtue of the dexterity described, and 
 the ever-increasing demand for it, have been ad- 
 vanced from point to point of honour and influence, 
 while remaining as they started a class subservient to 
 alien interests. What though Pharaoh is greater on 
 his throne, has he not said, According unto your 
 word shall all my people be ruled ? Thus amid 
 the stress of a ruder and a noisier commerce do the 
 idealists ply their trade in the heart of civilization, 
 conforming the methods of their own with those 
 of the other, and forgetting the austere delights of 
 the wilderness in the solace of fine linen and a golden 
 chain. 
 
 What is the essential difference between work and 
 slavery ? While we belong by our sympathies to 
 a community, not the most menial task set us to the 
 end of the general advantage can be called slavery. 
 When our occupation is a manual drudgery imposed 
 upon us without our consent, that is no doubt a form 
 37
 
 of slavery, but the mind can rise above it and even 
 turn it to account, as did Epictetus. So long as the 
 body labours for itself and for the mind, that is work. 
 Once the mind consents to labour for the body, that 
 is slavery. And it is the mind whose service con- 
 ventional life requires that faculty of original 
 thought, at the centre of each man's nature, which 
 alone utilizes all that the five senses bring him in 
 and which alone makes it worth his while to be alive. 
 
 The case, so far as Literary Men are concerned, 
 lies thus. Just as every man is born into the world 
 with a certain amount of capacity for working with 
 his hands, so is a certain capacity for thinking for 
 himself implanted in the mind of each man, which it 
 was the original intention of nature that he should 
 develop. But just as the child of fortunate parents 
 is not threatened with the alternative of manual 
 labour or starvation, so the mind need not nowadays 
 acquire ideas for itself in order to ward off vacuity. 
 For here comes in the function of idealists to 
 minister intellectual interests in all kinds of ingenious 
 ways to an unbelieving public : since indeed, under 
 no conditions, must man live by bread alone. 
 
 And he who, rather than any other, may be likened 
 to Joseph in Egypt, as having by reason of his pros- 
 perity become indirectly the cause of the captivity 
 of his brethren, was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 
 the artist. Not that he was an artist in the elder 
 and absolute sense of the word in which Milton or 
 38
 
 Michael Angelo were artists, who put themselves, 
 and not their dead selves, into their works ; yet in 
 connection with art his name is all-important, as 
 that of one who discovered, at a time when the 
 atmosphere of Europe was unduly charged with 
 ideas, and threatened to enter the life of each man 
 with disastrous consequences to society, the vast 
 capacities of art as an absorbent medium. He was 
 nothing less than the Franklin of idealism, whose 
 discovery withdrew the excess of ideas from the air, 
 and made them, what they had scarcely been before, 
 agents of civilization. Plato, where he defines what 
 he terms belief as being to truth what birth is to 
 existence, indicates an identification on the part of 
 each man with his ideas which has a strange, old- 
 world sound to people like us, who can hold, in 
 virtue of the imaginative reason, all ideas in turn 
 without attaching ourselves to any. In a word, 
 Goethe inaugurated the method of St Beuve as con- 
 trasted with that of St. Paul. And as Joseph, what- 
 ever subsequent miseries were traceable to his pros- 
 perity in Egypt, remains to this day one of the 
 glories of Israel, so must Goethe remain for ever one 
 of the glories of idealism. We have ourselves made 
 a pilgrimage to his laboratory in the peacefully laid 
 out old town of Weimar, at that season when the 
 year has rolled back its Autumnal mists and fruitful- 
 ness and the summer-dried roads are bright with 
 dust under glooming skies a square and self-suffi- 
 
 39
 
 cient mansion, with posterior gardens, standing back 
 by itself in an open and elevated space. Disturbed 
 only by the presence of a government official (who 
 seemed to feel himself identified with at least 
 Goethe's ideas), we stood in that small sanctum 
 where, morning after morning, those powerful and 
 luminous eyes, directed upon the tablet, drew the 
 great ideas of the world to incarnate themselves 
 thereon before them. Into this quiet little chamber 
 came the restless and swarming ideas which had 
 lately seemed to cloud all the plains of Europe under 
 their wings and minister ecliptic darkness to the 
 performance of evil deeds : they came and were 
 compelled within the magic inclosures of 'Wilhelm 
 Meister,' of 'Faust,' which the master had drawn 
 on his desk. They came to him out of every land 
 and out of every clime, ideas which had dwelt richly 
 in the Greek mind, which had illuminated the dark 
 faces of Hebrew seers, which had obsessed heretics 
 to their doom. And when his memoirs came to be 
 written and the secrets of his laboratory more or less 
 transpired, it was found that he had used no other 
 magic instrument than that of perfect physical well- 
 being ; and if at times the ignobilities incident to 
 life, the breath of the grey east wind, or mere 
 humour remaining over from an indiscretion of diet, 
 dulled its edge, he could yield without any uncouth 
 or pathetic struggle, and acknowledge the elder 
 powers of time and fate. He associated young 
 4.0
 
 Schiller with himself as apprentice, or Zauberlehrling, 
 and the work went forward briskly under their joint 
 partnership : a glorious concern, which made of 
 quiet little Weimar the very chief emporium of 
 ideas in Europe. Out of their mere surplus, the 
 two illustrious partners faced round on their con- 
 temporaries and amused themselves, like young men 
 who fling hot pennies to the rabble, with discharging 
 their desirable ideas, in form of epigrams, on people 
 who had none. A glorious time they had of it, 
 tasting here on earth the life of gods. And when at 
 last Goethe died his worn-out apprentice long 
 since under the sod insatiate to the last of the 
 common sunlight, and bequeathed his intellectual 
 fortunes to the artists (had he had his will he would 
 have bequeathed unto them the kingdom of heaven !) 
 it seemed indeed as though, by the establishment in 
 each nation of a community of efficient idealists, the 
 consummations of the promised land would not 
 exclude the generosities of the flesh-pots of Egypt : 
 as though that civilization which had made Goethe 
 chief councillor would surrender its blind hand to 
 the children of light, and suffer art to lead it into 
 those new heavens and new earth of which our own 
 Wordsworth and Shelley had caught a glimpse. But 
 yet a little while, and the flood-tide which had 
 upborne Goethe and Schiller had begun to ebb. 
 Civilization parts off with its own concerns and its 
 own huge problems, and idealists remain where the 
 4 1
 
 flood-tide has raised them. Or shall they sink with 
 it ? Many will no doubt elect to do so, and become 
 to Goethe and Schiller what Silius Italicus and 
 Statius became to Horace and Vergil, ministering 
 with an ever-dwindling imaginative reason to the 
 requirements of civilization. For the rest the 
 Remnant nothing remains but to discover a motive 
 for existence within themselves, to search for the 
 promised land of believers. 
 
 As with a thousand articles of small ware puppets, 
 engravings, pencils and what not so the best thoughts 
 may still be said to bear the impress, ' made in 
 Germany.' They are made there out of the car- 
 cases of old books, in a way somewhat like that 
 which Vergil divulges for the manufacture of bees. 
 Germany itself remains as passive as a bee-hive to 
 the in- and outgoings of its air-born swarms, which 
 fly humming in large numbers thence into the more 
 honied plains of other lands, and sojourn beneath 
 alien sycamores. If you would know how beauti- 
 fully pedantry plays into the hands of poetry, go to 
 one of the thought-raising districts of Germany, look 
 down from the neighbouring border of the forest 
 upon a university town, and watch the lights come 
 out at nightfall around the citadel, like spring prim- 
 roses. At that hour the professors are leaving the 
 libraries each with his day's gleanings put by securely 
 in his note-book : two or three thoughts of the best 
 quality disentangled patiently from tradition and 
 42
 
 ready for use. Where do they all go to ? Well, a 
 child might ask the same question of the constant 
 grimy yield of northern England : his parent only 
 wonders how Newcastle can warm so many hearths. 
 So the wonder here is, how these quiet little places 
 should be equal to the demand of idealists all the 
 world over. The prosperity of England is largely 
 due to its extraordinary supply of coals, and England 
 is called scbmutzig by Germany, whose national 
 trade leaves it at least cleaner hands. Yet, to a 
 thoughtful mind, the coal-trade of England and the 
 ideal-trade of Germany excite analogous misgivings. 
 Paradoxes, shreds of reading, and dry sticks fagotted, 
 employed by the Chosen People, at work in each 
 nation, in defect of the aboriginal and plastic idea, 
 begin to suggest some of those shifts to which Israel 
 was reduced in Egypt when it became necessary to 
 produce bricks without straw. 
 
 Make haste, therefore, ye Remnant, and begone ! 
 Be assured that the wave which still floats you in 
 prosperity will recede, as it has done again and yet 
 again, so far back into history as our documents 
 afford us a glimpse ! Take your occasion, and be not 
 found in the receding of the wave ! Threatening 
 times are behind, when the State, which now tolerates 
 and caresses you and arrays some of you in fine linen, 
 must remember that, after all, it // the State, and that 
 if it is to deal effectively with difficulties and dangers 
 which, after all, concern itself alone, it must draw 
 43
 
 itself together and clear of you, and go down, 
 unbroken and resigned, in the great relapse. A 
 Pharaoh will arise who knows you not, and who may 
 resolve to * deal wisely ' with you, with the wisdom, 
 namely, of this world. Let us glance at a time some 
 fourteen hundred years nearer to our own than that 
 night of dismay when Menephthah came hastily to 
 Moses and Aaron, saying, ' Rise up now and get you 
 forth from among my people, both ye and the child- 
 ren of Israel, and go, serve the Lord, as ye have said ! ' 
 The wave of progress has lately receded from Attica, 
 leaving it once more the dusty home of the tettix, and 
 is now high in the streets of Rome, flooding with the 
 triumph of life and with the spoils of time and of 
 memory the narrow precinct round which Romulus 
 drove his bullock. Now Rome's hour is come. 
 North and south, east and west, tramp its armies, 
 clashing with nameless nations and emerging beside 
 forlorn seas. Long straight roads, pointed out every- 
 where through the world, suck up into the seven hills 
 whatever ministers to victorious idleness and Olym- 
 pian laughter. Ever and again a conqueror returns 
 out of the shadows of the east and leads a train of 
 dazed princes up to the Capitol, and car after car of 
 their spoils : here in a moment, dazzlingly disbursed, 
 they will flash like old wine through the richly- 
 nurtured current of Roman life. And here once 
 again, in these favoured crowds, by these proud con- 
 querors, ideas are acknowledged as a grace, perhaps 
 44
 
 the crowning grace, of life. Here again, in this 
 hurry to and fro of the fortunate Romans, goes in and 
 out a Chosen People : idealists who place true empire 
 in self-sufficiency and poets who can please even a 
 conqueror's ear with the tale of the transitoriness of 
 civic prosperity. Here a Memmius, driving hard 
 through public and private life the horses of passion, 
 relents now and then in discourse with his eccentric 
 mutterer of verses, Lucretius. Here when Catullus 
 lets loose, in the name of idealism, a swarm of sting- 
 ing verses amid the barbaric revels of Julius Caesar 
 himself, that patrician, instead of nodding to one of 
 his assassins, will send round one of his less sinister 
 clients to the adventurous and lively poet, with an 
 invitation to next day's revels. Here Maecenas, aloft 
 at every spectacle, and with all Octavian's secrets in 
 his eyes, is not prouder of them than of the name of 
 him whom he maintains in shy woodland solitude, 
 Vergil. Here at the theatre, where Octavian and 
 Octavia have taken their places, and Maecenas and 
 Agrippa, there is the proud noise of a general uprising 
 when, stout and well-pleased, Horace enters. And 
 why not ? Why shall not idealism be exalted with 
 the tide of Roman fortune, and while Rome glitters 
 with all the jewels of the earth, gather to itself all 
 knowledge, all traditions, and the mystic hoards, now 
 disclosed by conquest, of the East ? Shall not idealism 
 sit, too, on the Capitol as Rome's ghostly bride ? 
 Shall not Vergil and Horace and the Stoics and 
 45
 
 Epicureans join with Augustus in leading in the 
 Golden Age ? Shall not Vergil, in gratitude for his 
 * unhonoured leisure,' mingle the shade of Julius 
 Caesar with those forms which, clad in whiteness, 
 look from the threshold of Olympus ? Shall not 
 Horace waive his republicanism, and, forgetting that 
 melancholy dreamer, Marcus Brutus, salute the god 
 in Augustus ? And by-and-by, when Augustus is an 
 older but still a present deity, but of Vergil and 
 Horace only their names and their works remain, why 
 in truth should not Ovidius Naso, to please the bril- 
 liant and agreeable courtiers who numbered him with 
 themselves, write in easy-gliding elegiacs his ' Ars 
 Amandi ?' As a matter of fact, however, this work 
 was felt by old Augustus to fall short of the traditions 
 of Vergil and Horace, and he abruptly ordered Ovid 
 into the wilderness, where, about that moment, an 
 idealist was secretly wandering whose idealism was 
 destined to turn back the numbering of the years and 
 to supplant the idealism of Horace and Vergil far up 
 into the future to the era of Goethe and Schiller. 
 Years pass, not many, and the present divinity of 
 Augustus is exchanged for his divine memory. 
 Idealism is no longer seated on the right hand in 
 council, but cowers under the fierce dominion of a 
 series of madmen. The tradition of Vergil and 
 Horace is indeed not only tolerated but encouraged ; 
 but idealism, as the ghostly bride of civilization, must 
 not remonstrate with the whims and extravagances of 
 46
 
 her lord. There is a Pliny, the shadow of Cicero ; a 
 Silius Italicus, the shadow of Vergil ; a Martial, the 
 shadow of Horace. At odd moments of license, too, 
 x more genuine literature of indignation finds vent 
 'si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.' Also 
 there has appeared in the State, lurking in high and 
 low places, a new idealism the idealism of the wil- 
 derness and of the Remnant, an idealism which only 
 concerns the idealist himself and those who, like 
 him, will commit themselves to the doctrine, * If ye 
 know these things, happy are ye if ye do them ' 
 there is a Seneca, wavering between the service of 
 God and of Mammon, and whose vacillation at 
 length costs him dear ; there is an Epictetus, who 
 must pursue his meditations under interruption, while 
 his master is playfully twisting his leg. At length a 
 new Czesar arises who knows not idealists, Domitian, 
 who in the year 89 A.D., without the intervention of 
 any Moses, acts in a way which recalls, to some 
 extent, the action to which Menephthah was so 
 reluctantly constrained : he drives the idealists out of 
 Rome. Well, Statius and Silius Italicus (who 
 managed, indeed, to remain) no doubt said to them- 
 selves, ' Horace and Vergil were divine poets ; why 
 cannot we also be divine, who can read like them the 
 Alexandrians, and themselves also ? ' just as we may 
 say now, ' Goethe and Schiller were gods, and 
 Michael Angelo and Leonardo ; why, then, do we 
 fail of the divine accent and manner, with our wider 
 47
 
 reach of thought, with our incomparably richer 
 experience ? ' and we cannot see that, though we 
 have the tongues of men and of angels, no rigour of 
 toil and self-devotion of study will avail to reproduce 
 the bourgeonings of civilization, the art which itself 
 is nature. 
 
 And poetry ? Ye bards, it is not you will utter 
 lamentation, who desire only a leader, stronger than 
 yourselves, to lead you forth into the wilderness ! You 
 will then sing no longer to a critical and moody 
 public a brief, wine-flushed note, but to the memory 
 of races epics once more, and thronged with heroic 
 forms. Already these forms have swept past you in 
 your hour of vision, and you reached out to them 
 from your environment, but could not attain to them. 
 Great fables revealed themselves unto you in parts, 
 but you were not ready for them and they became a 
 despair to you. They have blessed all your youth 
 with promise, but manhood comes and finds you still 
 waiting, and age is at hand and you have done 
 nothing : you have seen them no more. Every 
 youth is ardent to speak, and thinks himself a great 
 poet. Probably he is right : but most men strike 
 their colours point by point till they have no foot of 
 truth left to call their own. Life has not been to 
 them what they bargained for ; civilization has been 
 too much for them circumstances over which they 
 had no control. The gods, at least, have not loved 
 them. And at length some dry-eyed poet, glancing 
 48
 
 sidelong and half in fear at the watching heavens, 
 once so blue and fortunate to his early vision, pens a 
 last blasphemy of them and, leaving his tablets 
 behind him and covering his eyes, hurries down into 
 the way of death. 
 
 49
 
 CHISWICK PRESS t CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. 
 TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.