Moreover, in England at the present
time, when we are all so tolerant and imagine ourselves to be permeated
by intelligent sympathy with ideas, there seem to me to be hardly any
people who comprehend this point of view at all. There is a good deal
of interest in England in moral ideals, though even much of that is of
a Puritan and commercial type. The God that we ignorantly worship is
Success, and our interest in moral ideas is mainly confined to our
interest in what is successful. We are not in love with beautiful,
impracticable visions at all; we measure a man's moral intensity by the
extent to which he makes people respectable and prosperous. We believe
in an educator when he makes his boys do their work and play their
games; in a priest, when he makes people join clubs, find regular
employment, give up alcohol. We believe in a statesman when he makes a
nation wealthy and contented. We have no intellectual ideals, no ideals
of beauty. Our idea of poetry is that people should fall in love, and
our idea of art is the depicting of rather obvious allegories. These
things are good in their way, but they are very elementary. Our men of
intellect become scientific researchers, historians, erudite persons.
How few living writers there are who unite intellect with emotion! The
truth is that we do not believe in emotion; we think it a thing to play
with, a thing to grow out of, not a thing to live by.
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