nhood on things which only by being men we can enjoy--the
method of forging boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of having
elevated railways for dead men, wireless telegraphs for clods, gigantic
printing-presses for men who have forgotten how to read. "Let us all, by
all means, make all things for the world." So we set ourselves to our
task cheerfully, the task of attaining results for people at large by
killing people in particular off. We are getting to be already, even in
the arts, men with one sense. We have classes even in colour. Schools of
painters are founded by men because they have one seventh of a sense of
sight. Schools of musicians divide themselves off into fractions of the
sense of sound, and on every hand men with a hundred and forty-three
million cells in their brains, become noted (nobodies) because they only
use a hundred and forty-three. "What is the use of attaining results,"
one asks, "of making such a perfectly finished world, when there is not
a man in it who would pay any attention to it as a world?" If the planet
were really being improved by us, if the stars shone better by our
committing suicide to know their names, it might be worth while for us
all to die, perhaps, to make racks of ourselves, frames for souls (one
whole generation of us), in one single, heroic, concerted attempt to
perfect a universe like this, the use and mastery of it. But what would
it all come to? Would we not still be left in the way on it, we and our
children, lumbering it up, soiling and disgracing it, making a machine
of it? There would be no one to appreciate it. Our children would
inherit the curse from us, would be more like us than we are. If any one
is to appreciate this world, we must appreciate it and pass the old
secret on.

No one seems to believe in appreciating--appreciating more than one
thing, at least. The practical disappearance in any vital form of the
lecture-lyceum, the sermon, the essay, and the poem, the annihilation of
the imagination or organ of comprehension, the disappearance of
personality, the abolition of the editorial, the temporary decline of
religion, of genius, of the artistic temperament, can all be summed up
and symbolised in a single trait of modern life, its separated men,
interested in separate things. We are getting to be lovers of
contentedly separate things, little things in their little places all by
themselves. The modern reader is a skimmer, a starer at pictures, like a