gold, was actually this paradox of the nation of foreigners.
It was a republic of incognitos: no one knew
who anyone else was, and only the more ill-mannered
and uneasy even desired to know. In such a country
as this, gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their
gentility than thieves living in South Kensington
would take to conceal their blackguardism. In
such a country everyone is an equal, because everyone
is a stranger. In such a country it is not strange
if men in moral matters feel something of the irresponsibility
of a dream. To plan plans which are continually
miscarrying against men who are continually disappearing
by the assistance of you know not whom, to crush you
know not whom, this must be a demoralising life for
any man; it must be beyond description demoralising
for those who have been trained in no lofty or orderly
scheme of right. Small blame to them indeed if
they become callous and supercilious and cynical.
And the great glory and achievement of Bret Harte
consists in this, that he realised that they do not
become callous, supercilious, and cynical, but that
they do become sentimental and romantic, and profoundly
affectionate. He discovered the intense sensibility
of the primitive man. To him we owe the realisation
of the fact that while modern barbarians of genius
like Mr. Henley, and in his weaker moments Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, delight in describing the coarseness and
crude cynicism and fierce humour of the unlettered
classes, the unlettered classes are in reality highly
sentimental and religious, and not in the least like
the creations of Mr. Henley and Mr. Kipling. Bret
Harte tells the truth about the wildest, the grossest,
the most rapacious of all the districts of the earth—the
truth that, while it is very rare indeed in the world
to find a thoroughly good man, it is rarer still,
rare to the point of monstrosity, to find a man who
does not either desire to be one, or imagine that
he is one already.
ALFRED THE GREAT
The celebrations in connection with the millenary
of King Alfred struck a note of sympathy in the midst
of much that was unsympathetic, because, altogether
apart from any peculiar historical opinions, all men
feel the sanctifying character of that which is at
once strong and remote; the ancient thing is always
the most homely, and the distant thing the most near.
The only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since
by the sublime religious story a dead man only could
reconcile heaven and earth. In a certain sense
we always feel the past ages as human, and our own
age as strangely and even weirdly dehumanised.
In our own time the details overpower us; men’s
badges and buttons seem to grow larger and larger
as in a horrible dream. To study humanity in the
present is like studying a mountain with a magnifying
glass; to study it in the past is like studying it
through a telescope.