me that
we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are
contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to
simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always
sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as
if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,
suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and
staring face.

Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are
upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more
fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to
undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man,
classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist,
who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with
colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going
yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is
certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes
the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is
a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of
our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish
communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughly
and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the
return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it
consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think
that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into
ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into
very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according
to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself
with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to
kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would
be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the
claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is
interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of
paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth
of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike
in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the
return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of
fact, Mae