take its strength from one; at all other moments manner and matter will
be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is
carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with
unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and
savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation
over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature,
who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till
minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the
scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds
unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation's
future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only
as these things are understood by a child in a national school, while a
secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them
bitter and restless. They are like some state which has only paper money,
and seeks by punishments to make it buy whatever gold can buy. They no
longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a generation is like an
hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe
impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary
thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone.




III


Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual
apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills
intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the
mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that