tempt, unaided, and that we and all the
world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that
nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals
in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone
can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets
advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes
or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays
and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise
the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal
ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the
valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished
cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident,
but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien
philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to
have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to
do

It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of
all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human
experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the
reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern
man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two
starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past?
Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the
other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth
with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint
to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by
the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48? Are we still strong enough
to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos
contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we
decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a
barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to
sociologists--or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and
passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the
sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed
the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.

This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new
ideas, the limiting effect of the fut