eni of life is
imprisoned; you've only to open it and the life is yours. And what
life! That it's different from ours is just its merit. I don't mean
that it's necessarily better; but it preserves for us the things we
have dropped out. Because we, no more than the men of the past,
exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life is
unfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; not
the most passionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, of
course, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thing
is, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from the
spectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are much
more interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. I
mean, it seems to me so stupid--I oughtn't to say stupid, I suppose,
because of course you aren't exactly----" Whereat we laughed again,
and he pulled himself up. "What I mean is, that to take the philosophy
or the religion of the past and put it into your laboratory and test it
for truth, and throw it away if it doesn't answer the test, is to
misconceive the whole value and meaning of it. The real question is,
What extraordinary, fascinating, tragic or comic life went to produce
this precious specimen? What new revelation does it give of the
possibilities of the world? That's how you look at it, if you have the
sense of life. You feel after life everywhere. You love it when you
touch it. You ask it no questions about being good or bad. It just
is, and you are akin to it. Fancy, for instance, a man being able to
walk through the British Museum and pass the frieze of the Parthenon,
and say he has no use for it! And why? Because, I suppose, we don't
dress like that now, and can't ride horses bareback. Well, so much the
worse for us! But just think. There shrieking from the wall--no, I
ought to say singing with the voice of angels--is the spirit of life in
its loveliest, strongest, divinest incarnation, saying 'love me,
understand me, be like me!' And the new generation passes by with its
nose in the air sniffing, 'No! You're played out! You didn't know
science. And you didn't produce four children a-piece, as we mean to.
And your education was rhetorical, and your philosophy absurd, and your
vices--oh, unmentionable! No, no, young men! Not for us, thank you!'
And so they stalk on, don't you see them, with their rational costume,
and their rational minds,