e and to this generation of men? As Puritanism
seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of
the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.
Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the
"Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and
Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper,
wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that
passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.

Sec. 5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"

Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above
speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the
soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. It is an
affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World,
the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts
of men. "Im Anfang war die That." The "deed" is nearer the eternal
fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that
work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in
this or that deed. In painting, that impressionism which loves the
line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its
emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine
thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter
flows. A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's
lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into
living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from
which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's
ecstasy or mystery derives.

In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always
been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure. Indefiniteness is far from
proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal. "A
man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know
whither he is going." What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours
of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man
and the limited, precise ends of common days. Upon such a subject
Cromwell has the right to speak. Great himself, he was the cause of
the greatness that was in others. But in all things it was still
Jehovah that worked in him. Deeply penetrated with this belief,
Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his
th