Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/106

98 them was not one of the greatest forces in human affairs; their place was inferior and their connection with the life of man casual and slight. They represented so inadequately the idea, and it was the idea that won the race, that in the long run came in first. He had incontestably been in much closer relation to the idea a few months before than he was to-day: it made up a great deal for the bad side of politics that they were after all a clumsy system for applying and propagating the idea. The love of it had really been at certain hours at the bottom of his disposition to follow them up; though this had not been what he used to talk of most with his political comrades or even with Julia. Certainly, political as Julia was, he had not conferred with her much about the idea. However, this might have been his own fault quite as much as hers, and she probably took such an enthusiasm for granted—she took such a tremendous lot of things for granted. On the other hand he had put this enthusiasm forward frequently in his many discussions with Gabriel Nash, with the effect, it is true, of making that worthy scoff transcendentally at what he was pleased to term his hypocrisy. Gabriel maintained precisely that there were more ideas, more of those that man lived by, in a single room of the National Gallery than in all the statutes of Parliament. Nick had replied to this more than once that the determination of what man did live by was required; to which Nash had retorted (and it was very rarely that he quoted Scripture) that it was at any rate not by bread-and-butter alone. The statutes of Parliament gave him bread-and-butter tout au plus.

Nick Dormer at present had no pretension of trying this