THE EQUINOX
And what an object for servility! The fashionable dilet-
tante doubt, the fashionable dilettante faith, are neatly
balanced in the scales of mid-Victorian pragmatism, whose
coarse-fibred affettuosé bargain with God as with a huckster.
The British conception of the Noblest Man being that of a
cheating tradesman, their God is fashioned in that image, and
the ambition of them all is to cheat Him. So they avoid the
sceptic’s sneers by an affectation of doubt, the fanatic’s thunders
by an affectation of faith: between which two stools they fall
to the ground.
In the end they are more sceptic than the sceptic. Hear
how they try to be pious |
“ Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views,”
implies that the whole question of religion is so trivial that it
is really not worth while disturbing any one about it.
So too the play at scepticism results in an insane excess of
maudlin piety.
As we look back on that whole dreadful period, we sicken
at its loathsome cant, its /aissez-faire, its sweating, its
commercialism, its respectability, its humanitarianism, its
inhumanity.
Of this age we have two perfect relics.
If art be defined as the true reflection of the inmost soul
of the age, then the works of Alfred Tennyson and the Albert
Memorial are among our chiefest treasures.
How harmonious, too, they are! There is nothing in
Tennyson which the Memorial does not figure in one or other
of its gaudy features; no flatulence of the Memorial whose
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