Читать книгу On Everything онлайн

36 страница из 62

And why? There is a question you may ask some time before it will be answered. One thing is sure, though the sureness of it reposes on some base we cannot see: in the proportion that men are secure of their philosophy and social scheme, in that proportion they must in some fixed manner turn it upside down from time to time for their delight and show it on a stage or enact it in a religious ritual with all its rules reversed and the whole thing wrong way about. They have always done this in healthy States, and if ever our State gets healthy they will begin to do it again. It is a human craving, an intense craving—but why, it would be a business to say.

It must not be imagined that the craving or the expression of it has passed from us to-day. They have no more passed from us than the desire for property or for the tilling of the land. But their corporate character is broken up, they appear sporadically in individuals only, and are therefore often evil. They appear in the irony which is an increasing feature of our letters, in mad freaks and outbreaks for which men strained beyond bearing are punished, and they appear in fantastic prophecies of a changed world.