not invariably fools in their sensitiveness. They
serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields
to which the world has given glory. These execrate
him as the full-grown Golden Calf of heathenish worship.
And they are so restive because they are so patriotic.
Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts
regarding him. You have heard them. You
tell us they are you: accurately, they affirm,
succinctly they see you in his crescent outlines, tame
bulk, spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his
imperviousness to whatsoever does not confront the
sensual eye of him with a cake or a fist, his religious
veneration of his habitual indulgences, his peculiar
forms of nightmare. They swear to his perfect
personification of your moods, your Saxon moods, which
their inconsiderate spleen would have us take for
unmixedly Saxon. They are unjust, but many of
them speak with a sense of the foot on their necks,
and they are of a blood demanding a worshipworthy
idea. And they dislike Bull’s bellow of
disrespect for their religion, much bruited in the
meadows during his periods of Arcadia. They dislike
it, cannot forget the sound: it hangs on the
afflicted drum of the ear when they are in another
land, perhaps when the old devotion to their priest
has expired. For this, as well as for material
reasons, they hug the hatred they packed up among their
bundles of necessaries and relics, in the flight from
home, and they instruct their children to keep it
burning. They transmit the sentiment of the loathing
of Bull, as assuredly they would be incapable of doing,
even with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed motherly
Britannia the figure sitting in the minds of men for
our image—a palpitating figure, alive to
change, penetrable to thought, and not a stolid concrete
of our traditional old yeoman characteristic.
Verily he lives for the present, all for the present,
will be taught in sorrow that there is no life for
him but of past and future: his delusion of the
existence of a present hour for man will not outlast
the season of his eating and drinking abundantly in
security. He will perceive that it was no more
than the spark shot out from the clash of those two
meeting forces; and penitently will he gaze back on
that misleading spark-the spectral planet it bids
wink to his unreceptive stars—acknowledging
him the bare machine for those two to drive, no instrument
of enjoyment. He lives by reading rearward and
seeing vanward. He has no actual life save in
power of imagination. He has to learn this fact,
the great lesson of all men. Furthermore there
may be a future closed to him if he has thrown too
extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of
his. The sight of a broken-down plough is mournful,
but the one thing to do with it is to remove it from
the field.