Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/18

 the same self consciousness. The scorn of Bernard Shaw for the moguls of the academies and for social ideals is greater than the scorn of Engels for "eternal truths." Says Mr. Shaw, "The great musician accepted by his unskilled listener is vilified by his fellow musician. It was the musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the painters and not among the men in the street. It is the Royal Academy that places Mr. Marcus Stone above Mr. Burne Jones. It is not rational that it should be so but it is so for all that. The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether and finds in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us. Something whereby instead of resisting death we disarm it by committing suicide." Here is a note of modernity which Engels was hardly modern enough to appreciate and yet it was written before he died.

Nietzsche, Tolstoy and a host of minor writers have all had their fling at "eternal truths" and modern ideals. The battle has long since rolled away from the ground on which Engels fought. His arguments on the dialectic are commonplaces to-day which it would be a work of supererogation to explain to anyone except the persistent victim of Little Bethel. The world has come to accept them with the equanimity with which it always accepts long disputed truths.

The sacred right of nationality for which men contended in Engels youth, as a direct consequence of political "eternal truths" has been ruthlessly brushed aside. The philosopher talks of the shameful spoliation of the amaller by the larger nations, a moral view of commercial progress, which an age, grown more impatient of "eternal truths" than Engels himself simply ignores,