to the public
welfare--a thing uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting?

The same desperate, irrational, immoral imagination which inspires
races with a strange madness, inspires individuals too with a strange
madness.

Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use denying it, the
last refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled by machinery and
sentiment, of the free, wild, reckless, irresponsible, anarchical
imagination of such as refuse to sacrifice their own dreams for the
dreams--not less illusive--of the general herd.

We have to face the fact--bitter and melancholy though it may
be--that in our great bourgeois-dominated democracies the majority of
people would like to trample out the flame of genius altogether;
trample it out as something inimical to their peace.

Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely aware of
this instinctive hatred with which the mob of men regard what is
exceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of the author of Coriolanus
must chuckle bitterly in that grave in Stratford-on-Avon when he
learns that the new ideal is the ideal of cosmopolitan literature
expressing the soul of the average man.

The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public opinion,
concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of the
individual artist playing, in noble irresponsibility, with all illusions.

It was his consciousness of this--of the natural antagonism of the
mob and its leaders to all great literature--that made Goethe draw
back so coldly and proudly from the popular tendencies of his time,
and seek refuge among the great individualistic spirits of the classic
civilisations. And what Goethe--the good European--did in his hour,
the more classical among European writers of our own day do still.

The great style--the style which is like gold and bronze in an age of
clay and rubble--remains as the only sure refuge we have from the
howling vulgarities of our generation. If books were taken from
us--the high, calm, beautiful, ironical books of classic tradition--how, in
this age, could the more sensitive among us endure to live at all?

With brutality and insanity and ruffianism, with complacency and
stupidity and sentimentalism, jostling us and hustling us on all sides,
how could we live, if it were not for the great, calm, scornful
anarchists of the soul, whose high inviolable imaginations
perpetually refresh and re-create the world?

And we who find this