free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety
and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;
they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct
or dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the
ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the longing
to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To
be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was
really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one
seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by
the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.
Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to
enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of
living consisted in dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was
loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its
beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own
fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a
substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in
sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more
indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to
which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be meaner than the
anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with
any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit
with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days men
recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive
and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life,
and more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking
of the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged