of indifference. The continued
existence of a stupid and insensitive world, incapable of aesthetic
rapture or metaphysical ecstasy, is not particularly desirable. It may
be wise to wage war for the sake of civilization; that is a question of
probabilities with which I am not at present concerned: but a war that
leaves the world poorer in art or thought is, whatever its political
consequences, a victory for barbarism and for humanity a disaster. A
nation that would defend the cause of civilization must remain
civilized; and that a nation may emerge civilized from fierce and
exhausting war, that it may preserve unabated its power for good, it is
necessary that during its horrid and circumscribing labours there should
have been men who, detached and undismayed, continued to serve interests
higher and wider than the interests of any State or confederacy. In
times of storm and darkness it is the part of artists and philosophers
to tend the lamp. This duty they perform unconsciously by simply minding
their own business.

Artists and philosophers and those who are apt to handle truth and
beauty are, in fact, the vestals of civility. To be sure, they are not
appointed or elected, neither are they consecrate nor shorn nor always
chaste; nevertheless, they tend the lamp. Because they alone can project
their thoughts and feelings far beyond the frontiers of States and
Empires, because their sympathies and interests are universal, because
they can lose themselves in timeless abstractions, because their kingdom
is not of this world, they alone in times of division and calamity and
shortsighted passion can keep the flame alive. Thus do they
unintentionally serve the State. So far as they are concerned their
beneficence is quite adventitious, their service supererogatory. For
they do not live to serve humanity, but to serve their masterful and
inhuman passion; by serving that faithfully they save the world. Let
them continue to think and feel, watching, untroubled, the cloudless
heavens, till men, looking up from their beastly labours, again catch
sight of the unchanging stars.

_Mens equa in arduis_: calm and unconcerned in the hurricane: the mind
set steadily on indestructible things: that, I think, is how it should
be in these days with artists and philosophers. When the Roman soldiers
entered Syracuse they found Archimedes absorbed in a mathematical
problem. He never raised his head and they killed him where he sat.

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