l our evil
days. The great "movement"--that was the cant term--went on: a
diseased commotion, moral and physical. Art--the Arts--arose supreme,
and once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had elevated
them to power. Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty
of Nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and
still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a
God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might
be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with
system, and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities.
Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and
in the face of analogy and of God--in despite of the loud warning
voice of the laws of _gradation_ so visibly pervading all things in
Earth and Heaven--wild attempts at an omniprevalent Democracy were
made. Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil,
Knowledge. Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking
cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath
of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages
of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una, even our
slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-fetched might have
arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own
destruction in the perversion of our _taste_, or rather in the blind
neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this
crisis that taste alone--that faculty which, holding a middle position
between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely
have been disregarded--it was now that taste alone could have led us
gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure
contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the
[Greek: mousichae] which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient
education for the soul! Alas for him and for it!--since both were most
desperately needed, when both were most entirely forgotten or despised
[1]. Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how
truly!--"_Que tout notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au
sentiment;_" and it is not impossible that the sentiment of the
natural, had time permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency
over the harsh mathematical reason of the schools. But this thing was
not to be. Prematurely ind