ng too much about morality, not by feeling too
little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sort
of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company of
keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and
wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channel
by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was the
greatest that was ever given to men to do except that which Christianity
did in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after the Dark
Ages. But they did it, and no one else could have done it.

Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe on a
point of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful class
as mere refuse to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter the great
estates at a stroke; we are not ready to trust ourselves in an
awful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all things seem
intelligible and all men feel honourable henceforth. We are not strong
enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong enough to be as weak
as Robespierre. There is only one thing, it seems, that we can do. Like
a mob of children, we can play games upon this ancient battlefield;
we can pull up the bones and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of
that unimaginable war; and we can chatter to each other childishly and
innocently about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal.
I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are
imbecile.

The Wrath of the Roses

The position of the rose among flowers is like that of the dog among
animals. It is so much that both are domesticated as that have some dim
feeling that they were always domesticated. There are wild roses and
there are wild dogs. I do not know the wild dogs; wild roses are very
nice. But nobody ever thinks of either of them if the name is abruptly
mentioned in a gossip or a poem. On the other hand, there are tame
tigers and tame cobras, but if one says, "I have a cobra in my pocket,"
or "There is a tiger in the music-room," the adjective "tame" has to be
somewhat hastily added. If one speaks of beasts one thinks first of wild
beasts; if of flowers one thinks first of wild flowers.

But there are two great exceptions; caught so completely into the
wheel of man's civilization, entangled so unalterably with his ancient
emotions and images, that the artificial product seems more natural
than the natural. Th