ne of the antique.
Perhaps it is nearly always found with a corresponding outward
semblance. The veil or mask of such a nature would be the very
opposite of the "dim blackguardism" of Danton, the type Carlyle has
made too popular for the true interest of art. It is just this sort of
entire transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously all that
is really lifegiving in the established order of things; it detects
without difficulty all sorts of affinities between its own elements,
and the nobler elements in that order. But then its wistfulness and a
confidence in perfection it has makes it love the lords of change.
What makes revolutionists is either self-pity, or indignation [252] for
the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception of the dominant
undercurrent of progress in things. The nature before us is
revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth, that chlide,+
that pride of life, which to the Greek was a heavenly grace. How can
he value what comes of accident, or usage, or convention, whose
individual life nature itself has isolated and perfected? Revolution
is often impious. They who prosecute revolution have to violate again
and again the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since after
all progress is a kind of violence. But in this nature revolutionism is
softened, harmonised, subdued as by distance. It is the revolutionism
of one who has slept a hundred years. Most of us are neutralised by
the play of circumstances. To most of us only one chance is given in
the life of the spirit and the intellect, and circumstances prevent our
dexterously seizing that one chance. The one happy spot in our nature
has no room to burst into life. Our collective life, pressing equally
on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level
of a colourless uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, not
by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. In these no
single gift, or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance. The
world easily confounds these two conditions. It sees in the character
before us only indifferentism. Doubtless the chief vein of the life of
humanity [253] could hardly pass through it. Not by it could the
progress of the world be achieved. It is not the guise of Luther or
Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the
Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded
himself to neither, but stood sti