moralist, at its elbow. But
wherever and however it came, it transformed with lightning rapidity,
just in that way in which Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Forster, and Mr.
Winston Churchill, the American, have indicated; till the mere fact of
its transforming became so remarkable and absorbing that that fact has
almost exhausted the attention of three-fourths of the artists and
intellectuals of our age.

So habituated then have we become to rapid change in the conditions of
life that the first thing we postulate is further change. The rustic
accustomed to the same food every day of his life does not criticise
his fare; it is the epicure, accustomed to variety, who is critical of
the menu. The active mind which witnesses perpetual variety must be
perpetually critical. To be aware that the conditions of to-day are
different from the conditions of yesterday and of to-morrow is,
according to the temperament of the beholder, to lament the past or to
hasten the future. In this respect the Radical and the Conservative
are alike, that it is the perception of change which determines them,
though it determines them in different ways, the one being affected by
hope, the other by fear. Both are discontented with the present, the
one because it falls short of the future, which he imagines, the other
because it has departed from the security of the past, which he
idealises. And, as we have seen, even the creative artist cannot
escape from the fascination of this ever-changing environment, where
the unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents, and the
unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the
alternative of unimaginable evil. All perceive that something must be
done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy
which, as its onrush is in any case irresistible, may at any moment
deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition. When the
guns are firing and the battle is joined and the cries of the wounded
fill the air, there are not many who can sit down in the midst, like
the German philosopher at the battle of Austerlitz, to contemplate the
Absolute. Most of them, even though their function is art, rush out to
join the melee; and this is why they incur the censure of the
reviewers, making fiction and drama a branch of sociology.

But one seems to hear, distinguishable occasionally amidst the din, a
low, faint murmur. This way madness lies. Is man, the master of his
soul, to be t