Page:Hichens - The Green Carnation.djvu/198

190 We are beginning, only beginning, to understand some of the canons of the beautiful art of folly."

Here Esmé changed his ebony stick into his other hand, and glanced round at Lord Reggie, with a delicate smile of self-approbation. Then he proceeded, without clearing his throat.

"The mind of man has, however, always clung with a poetic persistence to certain fallacies which have greatly interfered with the proper progress of folly, and have terribly hindered the evolution of disorder out of order, and of unreason out of reason. To give only a few instances. For centuries upon centuries we have been told by those unenlightened beings called philosophers, sages, and thinkers, that children should obey their parents, that the old should direct the young, that Nature is the mother of beauty, and that wisdom is the parent of true greatness. For centuries upon centuries we have had instilled into us the malign conception that in renunciation we shall find peace, and in starvation the most satisfying plenty. Men and women have lived to be dumb, instead of living to speak; have stopped their ears to the alluring cries of folly; have gone to the grave with all their sublime absurdities still in them, unuttered, unexpressed,