emn. Their dignity was not a
pompous dignity, but the dignity of high tragedy, of unconquerable
courage and ruthless fate; not the dignity of the well-appointed house
and the tradition of excellent manners.

Of course our love of wealth and comfort is to a certain extent
responsible for this. We have been thrown off our balance by the vast
and rapid development of the resources of the earth, the binding of
natural forces to do our bidding; it is the most complicated thing in
the world nowadays to live the simple life; and not until we can gain a
rich simplicity, not until we can recover an interest in ideas rather
than an appetite for comforts, will our force and vitality return to
us.

We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the
right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the
people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of
industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and
historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have
become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we
can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and
ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers,
with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology
with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a
vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited,
and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure
like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the
intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in
Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in
Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest
against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down
comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on
delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.

Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science,
the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be
known, not to form conclusions without evidence. But the scientific
attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain
dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness
of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment. Not in such a
mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men