look.
Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions
as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist
who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a
paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home
limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has
ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free from national prejudices
and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside
"Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature:
he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall
between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you
describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want
is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments;
we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments.
It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man
is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of
a city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly
detained there), but I am by no means free of that building.
How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing
them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? THIS was the
achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions.
Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic,
the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism,
as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting
optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil,
could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions
were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could
pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march,
the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle.
But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw
as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds.
But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was with all the
other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion.
By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly
inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them
to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible
only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness.
Historic Christianity rose into a high and