congested intelligences, the confusion of ugly, half empty churches
and chapels and meeting-halls gauge the intensity of his congested
souls, the tricks and slow blundering dishonesties of Diet and
Congress and Parliament are his statecraft and his wisdom. . . .

"I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead for pride. I say
here now to you and to High Heaven that THIS LIFE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH
FOR ME. I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a
better life possible now. I know it. A better individual life and
a better public life. If I had no other assurances, if I were blind
to the glorious intimations of art, to the perpetually widening
promise of science, to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form
and colour and the inaccessible mockery of the stars, I should still
know this from the insurgent spirit within me. . . .

"Now this better life is what I mean when I talk of Aristocracy.
This idea of a life breaking away from the common life to something
better, is the consuming idea in my mind.

"Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life of the farm and
the shop, the inn and the market, the street and the crowd, is
something that is not of the common life. Its way of thinking is
Science, its dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind.
It is not the common thing. But also it is not an unnatural thing.
It is not as common as a rat, but it is no less natural than a
panther.

"For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato
grower, it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek
explanations and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a