FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38  
39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   >>   >|  
_clairvoyant_ culture. But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years that man has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of its presence. In individuals, yes--in the Greek Plato, and I think in your English Milton and Bishop Berkeley--but in humanity, never; and hardly in any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, is not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course, conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first requisite to a _regime_ of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious person--he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at novelty--once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. A certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means anything, can only mean the art by which men live musically together--to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, to triumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formula defining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled," should surely at this hour be _too_ primitive--_too_ Opic--to bring anything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and the very fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptance in all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: _idea_] which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed--far, perhaps, by ages and aeons--from becoming part of the general conception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of living ever so much as approached solution, much less
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38  
39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

culture

 

reason

 

Periclean

 

general

 

greater

 

bursts

 
Panpipes
 

musically

 

triumphant

 
lutings

profound

 

consciousness

 

butterfly

 

thousand

 
bungler
 

chrysalis

 
assumption
 

contempt

 

astonishment

 

Civilisation


martial
 

abstract

 

occasioned

 

finally

 

condition

 
assume
 

acceptance

 

quarters

 

indication

 

living


approached

 

solution

 

problem

 

conception

 

Nowhere

 
beginning
 

undoubting

 
elaborately
 

tickled

 

surely


dithyrambs

 
formula
 

defining

 

primitive

 

skinned

 

definition

 
Divinity
 

marching

 
civilisation
 
concerned