Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/250

238 we die, carefully explaining, it is true, that this is to be interpreted in the most refined and catholic sense. Who has preached such charming sermons from this purely hedonistic text as the alleged idealist Renan? And Goethe is our great and patron saint. All the artists—poets, painters, musicians, writers—believe in the hunt for happiness more or less in the temper of Beyle. Rossetti writes an indignant sonnet against the Tsar-slayers, and celebrates in a vehement ode the reactionary peace "wrought" by the ice-bound Toryism of Wellington. They all, in their hearts, cling passionately to individualism—to the chance given to the man of talent, the fox in the well, to utilise the stupid horns of the average goat as the means of egress into the sunlight. They have no faith in the kindly social impulse, in the evolution of imbeciles, in the higher combinations of the race; and perhaps they are right: time alone will show. All I say is that we are trying for something different, not altogether because we believe in our own theory of life as good and eventually practicable, but because we see that the other theory has been tried in the history of the world again and again, often with magnificent results, but always with the appalling sacrifice of eighty per cent, of the community to the claims of an ignorant and miserable servitude; always with final failure to achieve anything like permanency and success.'