nest, but the highest types and the
best combinations of them are the rarest. There is more love in the
world than anything else, for instance; but the best love and the
individual in whom love is supreme are the rarest of all things.
That for which humanity has the strongest claim upon its workmen,
is the representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the
present day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of
which men see the most--that type of things which could never have
been but that it might pass. The demand marks the commonness,
narrowness, low-levelled satisfaction of the age. It loves its
own--not that which might be, and ought to be its own--not its
better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the sake of
whose approach it exists. I do not think that the age is worse in
this respect than those which have preceded it, but that vulgarity,
and a certain vile contentment swelling to self-admiration, have
become more vocal than hitherto; just as unbelief, which I think in
reality less prevailing than in former ages, has become largely more
articulate, and thereby more loud and peremptory. But whatever the
demand of the age, I insist that that which ought to be presented to
its beholding, is the common good uncommonly developed, and that not
because of its rarity, but because it is truer to humanity. Shall I
admit those conditions, those facts, to be true exponents of
humanity, which, except they be changed, purified, or abandoned,
must soon cause that humanity to cease from its very name, must
destroy its very being? To make the admission would be to assert
that a house may be divided against itself, and yet stand. It is
the noble, not the failure from the noble, that is the true human;
and if I must show the failure, let it ever be with an eye to the
final possible, yea, imperative, success. But in our day, a man who
will accept any oddity of idiosyncratic development in manners,
tastes, or habits, will refuse, not only as improbable, but as
inconsistent with human nature, the representation of a man trying
to be merely as noble as is absolutely essential to his
being--except, indeed, he be at the same time represented as failing
utterly in the attempt, and compelled to fall back upon the
imperfections of humanity, and acknowledge them as its laws. Its
improbability, judged by the experience of most men I admit; its
unreality in fact I deny; and its absolute unity with the