We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the
right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the
people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of
industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and
historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have
become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we
can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and
ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers,
with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology
with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a
vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited,
and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure
like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the
intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in
Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in
Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest
against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down
comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on
delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.
Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science,
the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be
known, not to form conclusions without evidence.
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