r implicit claim: that morality is a delusion, and that a romantic suffering, worshiped, is preferable to decency. The pedants pall, irrespective of the truth or falsity of their own implicit claim, that a preciseness of language is more important than attention to the things of which we speak. These two attitudes are simply coeval with civilization, and seem to be degenerated forms of moral and intellectual virtues, answers to the purposelessness that sometimes attends on peaceful prosperity. It’s perhaps worth noticing that they belong properly in a world from which strife has been banished.
That this is really a question about education and enlightenment is made clear in the sequel: After the question about learning how to live comes the question concerning children. Is it really possible that very famous writers, the most influential in their generation, the proudest flowers of Edwardian England, much in the news concerning the Nobel Prize of Literature, not know what children are like? Can human nature be concealed behind ideology? I’ll add, strife was not unknown to Wells and Shaw, but it had a utopian quality, it was about progress, social and psychological. It is the uselessness of play, as opposed to rational control of life through scientific means, that baffles the efforts to uplift mankind; it is the natural evil of the human being, the chaotic striving, innocent of any class consciousness or social project, that baffles the efforts to ennoble mankind at the price of any individual freedom. That rationalists are growing rational means nothing else than they are becoming acquainted with human things, which they had held in contempt.
But then you see a striking change, one last lone image of mere nature—a thing you’d have to leave the city just to see, a thing both plain and secret, known to those who try to find it and to follow in its winding way. It is not unlikely, given the theme of the stanza, that a stream astray is an image intended to recall soul. Here, nature and chance are visible apart from any art except that of the poet, and apart from that, too. The three stanzas seem to suggest different human possibilities. It is remarkable that Chesterton suggested that the burden of education is supposed to be relieved by an appeal to nature.
The man whose head will fall anon is and is not a mere Danton, and a Robespierre the man who topples it, and who must then himself be likewise overran. There is a revolutionary confidence in those who would tell us what to expect and what to do, and yet the revolution may betray their confidence. The man who says as much is one who thinks not how to move events, nor yet is moved out of himself by them.
This essay in our series of “Timeless Essays” was first published here in March 2017.
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Editor’s note: The featured image is “The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides” (c. 1824–27), by William Blake.