Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that ‘He has set the borders of
the nations according to His angels.’ It is these angels, each one
the genius of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders
of intellectual traditions; and as lovers understand in their first
glance all that is to befall them, and as poets and musicians see the
whole work in its first impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening
whatever the generations that are to prolong their traditions shall
accomplish in detail. It is only at the awakening—as in ancient Greece,
or in Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia—that great
numbers of men understand that a right understanding of life and of
destiny is more important than amusement. In London, where all the
intellectual traditions gather to die, men hate a play if they are told
it is literature, for they will not endure a spiritual superiority; but
in Athens, where so many intellectual traditions were born, Euripides
once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking his playgoers whether
it was his business to teach them, or their business to teach him.
New races understand instinctively, because the future cries in their
ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and that all life
is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying out as
it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one of
our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners,
the perfecting of law—countless images of a fading light—can create
nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards
some perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because
miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself
has no power except to die and to forget. If one studies one’s own
mind, one comes to think with Blake, that ‘every time less than a
pulsation of the artery is equal to six thousand years, for in this
period the poet’s work is done; and all the great events of time start
forth and are conceived in such a period, within a pulsation of the
artery.’
February, 1900.