n which such vast systems have been superimposed--this may mean
anything. It may be a dream, it may be a joke, it may be a trap or
temptation, it may be a charade, it may be the beatific vision: the only
thing of which we are certain is this human soul. This human soul finds
itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the grass. It has brought
forth poetry and religion in order to explain matters; it will bring
them forth again. It matters not one atom how often the lulls of
materialism and scepticism occur; they are always broken by the
reappearance of a fanatic. They have come in our time: they have been
broken by Maeterlinck.

RUSKIN[2]

I do not think anyone could find any fault with the way in which Mr.
Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin
himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in
passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for
admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and
revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin's humour, and one of the
deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone
else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humourist. Yet he was a great
humourist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as "one-sided"
were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in
language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not
sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by
rhetoric. One tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a
modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of
nonsense as Mr. Max Beerbohm. Only ... he was fond of other things too.
He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.

But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship
with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the
last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early
Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit
above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have
destroyed it; humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as
scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and
persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away.
The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under
the last leadership of Mr. Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the
box, and the new order with its