thing than the puling reveries of hedonists; it will be like the
sea, not like the scattered moorland pools."

"Do you mean," said Hugh, "when you talk so magniloquently of the
culture of the future, that it will be different from the culture of
the present and of the past?"

"No, no," said Sheldon, "not different at all, only wider and more
free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly,
belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised
up to a certain point? The difficulty is that we can't reach that
point all at once--why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to
reach it!--and at present we can't get further than the municipal
art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But that
is not what we are aiming at, and you are not to suppose that yours is
a different ideal of beauty and sensibility from ours. What I object
to is that you and your friends are so select and so condescending.
You seem to have no idea of the movement of humanity, the
transformation of the race, the corporate rise of emotion."

"No," said Hugh, "I have no idea what you are speaking of, and I
confess it sounds to me very dull. I have never been able to
generalise. I find it easy enough to make friends with homely and
simple people, but I think I have no idea of the larger scheme. I can
only see the little bit of the pattern that I can hold in my hand.
Every human being that I come to know appears to me strangely and
appallingly distinct and un-typical; of course one finds that many of
them adopt a common stock of conventional ideas, but when you get
beneath that surface, the character seems to me solitary and aloof.
When people use words like 'democracy' and 'humanity,' I feel that they
are merely painting themselves large, magnifying and dignifying their
own idiosyncrasies. It does not uplift and exalt me to feel that I am
one of a class. It depresses and discourages me. I hug and cherish my
own differences, my own identity. I don't want to suppress my own
idiosyncrasies at all; and what is more, I do not think that the race
makes progress that way. All the people who have really set their mark
upon the world have been individualists. Not to travel far for
instances, look at the teaching of our Saviour; there is not a hint of
patriotism, of the rights of society, of common effort, of the
corporateness of which you speak. He spoke to the individual. He
showed that if t