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.