defensive of his children and his possessions, and so until he wearies.  Then he dies and needs a cemetery.  He needs a cemetery because he is so afraid of dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants a place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to the All that made him.  Our chief impression of long ages of mankind comes from its cemeteries.  And this is the life of man, as the common man conceives and lives it.  Beyond that he does not go, he never comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens about him; his passion for security, his gregarious self-defensiveness, makes him accumulate upon himself until he congests in cities that have no sense of citizenship and states that have no structure; the clumsy, inconsecutive lying and chatter of his newspapers, his hoardings and music-halls gives the measure of his congested intelligences, the confusion of ugly, half empty churches and chapels and meeting-halls gauge the intensity of his congested souls, the tricks and slow blundering dishonesties of Diet and Congress and Parliament are his statecraft and his wisdom. . . .

“I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead for pride.  I say here now to you and to High Heaven that this life is not good enough for me.  I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a better life possible now.  I know it.  A better individual life and a better public life.  If I had no other assurances, if I were blind to the glorious intimations of art, to the perpetually widening promise of science, to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form and colour and the inaccessible mockery of the stars, I should still know this from the insurgent spirit within me. . . .

“Now this better life is what I mean when I talk of Aristocracy.  This idea of a life breaking away from the common life to something better, is the consuming idea in my mind.

“Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life of the farm and the shop, the inn and the market, the street and the crowd, is something that is not of the common life.  Its way of thinking is Science, its dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind.  It is not the common thing.  But also it is not an unnatural thing.  It is not as common as a rat, but it is no less natural than a panther.

“For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato grower, it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek explanations and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a hut, or show kindness to a child.  It is a folly I will not even dispute about, that man’s only natural implement is the spade.  Imagination, pride, exalted desire are just as much Man, as are hunger and thirst and sexual curiosities and the panic dread of unknown things. . . .