Prince Zaleski | Page 8

think in your English Milton and Bishop Berkeley--but in
humanity, never; and hardly in any individual outside those two nations.
The reason, I fancy, is not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that
Time, so far as he is concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it
being, of course, conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of
men, as the first requisite to a _régime_ of culture, must nick to itself a
longer loop of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A
loquacious person--he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the
way, if that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence
at novelty--once assured me that he could never reflect without
swelling on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the
mighty civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean.
A certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded
his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a
hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general,
greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither
the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human

consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a
butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was
therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my profound
astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means anything,
can only mean the art by which men live musically together--to the
lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, to triumphant
organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formula defining it
as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled," should surely
at this hour be too primitive--too Opic--to bring anything but a smile to
the lips of grown white-skinned men; and the very fact that such a
definition can still find undoubting acceptance in all quarters may be an
indication that the true [Greek: _idéa_] which this condition of being
must finally assume is far indeed--far, perhaps, by ages and
aeons--from becoming part of the general conception. Nowhere since
the beginning has the gross problem of living ever so much as
approached solution, much less the delicate and intricate one of living
_together: à propos_ of which your body corporate not only still
produces criminals (as the body-natural fleas), but its very elementary
organism cannot so much as catch a really athletic one as yet.
Meanwhile you and I are handicapped. The individual travaileth in pain.
In the struggle for quality, powers, air, he spends his strength, and yet
hardly escapes asphyxiation. He can no more wriggle himself free of
the psychic gravitations that invest him than the earth can shake herself
loose of the sun, or he of the omnipotences that rivet him to the
universe. If by chance one shoots a downy hint of wings, an instant
feeling of contrast puffs him with self-consciousness: a tragedy at once:
the unconscious being "the alone complete." To attain to anything, he
must needs screw the head up into the atmosphere of the future, while
feet and hands drip dark ichors of despair from the crucifying cross of
the crude present--a horrid strain! Far up a nightly instigation of stars
he sees: but he may not strike them with the head. If earth were a boat,
and mine, I know well toward what wild azimuths I would compel her
helm: but gravity, gravity--chiefest curse of Eden's sin!--is hostile.
When indeed (as is ordained), the old mother swings herself into a
sublimer orbit, we on her back will follow: till then we make to
ourselves Icarian "organa" in vain. I mean to say that it is the plane of
station which is at fault: move that upward, you move all. But

meantime is it not Goethe who assures us that "further reacheth no man,
make he what stretching he will"? For Man, you perceive, is not many,
but One. It is absurd to suppose that England can be free while Poland
is enslaved; Paris is far from the beginnings of civilisation whilst
Toobooloo and Chicago are barbaric. Probably no ill-fated,
microcephalous son of Adam ever tumbled into a mistake quite so huge,
so infantile, as did Dives, if he imagined himself rich while Lazarus sat
pauper at the gate. Not many, I say, but one. Even Ham and I here in
our retreat are not alone; we are embarrassed by the uninvited spirit of
the present; the adamant root of the mountain on whose summit we
stand is based ineradicably in the low world. Yet, thank Heaven,
Goethe was not quite right--as, indeed, he proved in his proper person. I
tell you,