living, a mere aimless
living, he fears and so he does not wander, he is jealous and stays by
his wife and his job, is fiercely yet often stupidly and injuriously
defensive of his children and his possessions, and so until he wearies.
Then he dies and needs a cemetery. He needs a cemetery because he is so
afraid of dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants
a place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to
the All that made him. Our chief impression of long ages of mankind
comes from its cemeteries. And this is the life of man, as the common
man conceives and lives it. Beyond that he does not go, he never
comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens about him;
his passion for security, his gregarious self-defensiveness, makes him
accumulate upon himself until he congests in cities that have no
sense of citizenship and states that have no structure; the clumsy,
inconsecutive lying and chatter of his newspapers, his hoardings and
music-halls gives the measure of his 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.