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Chapter IX
What is Culture?

"Now I understand why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first and most beautiful wooings. Were this not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years." — Rudyard Kipling: The Finest Story in the World.

Once to have met, if only for a short minute, some one rare and exceptional, and to have seen him vanish irrevocably from our side while the sunshine of his presence still glowed upon us — this is an experience which, to a person gifted with a fine taste and a good memory in these things, must be the cause of lifelong regret. Such regret may diminish with time; it may cease from being constantly with us; it may tend to return at ever more distant intervals; but on those occasions when it does return, when the name of that rare person is recalled but for one instant it never fails to revive that feeling of profound sadness which was ours at the time of the original loss.
        If this is so of one rare man we may have met in the past, to how much greater an extent is it not so of our own rare moments or moods!
        Last night suppose that you had a dream! a dream in which a feeling so rare, so prodigiously unusual and exceptional, filled your being, that you woke breathless with surprise, all your nerves still thrilled and titillating from the unutterable beauty of your experience, and you yourself scarcely believing that your inner life possessed anything so exquisitely strange and so wondrously precious. The whole of to-day you have thought and thought, arid racked and ransacked your brain, but not a glimmer of

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that incomparable feeling comes back to you. You know you have had it; you know, therefore, that you are capable of it, and you long either to have it again or at least to be able to enshrine it for good in the jewel-house of your memory. And yet your brain is powerless to recall it, and responds to your untiring efforts, only as the limb of the paralytic responds to his will. It seems to lie very far away, not in your life, perhaps, but in a life extremely remote, buried in ages across which your voice and your will can no longer be heard or felt. The life of one of your ancestors, belike, experienced this joy, the mere reverberation of which across countless generations almost shattered you in your sleep.
        Looking around you, looking before you into the future, nothing seems to promise to regenerate that feeling within you, and yet you repeat to yourself half in despair, half in anger: "It was in me, therefore I was capable of it." And, just as you may often have wished that the rare man you once chanced to meet might be a more common occurrence in the world about you, so you ask yourself now what you must do, what must be done, what change must come over your world in order that the rare moment you had in your dream may at least enter your waking life and become a more constant feeling either with you or with your children.
        And this inquiry pursued with earnestness and courage, and with rapt attention to that inner voice of yours, which is the voice of your ancestors and of their triumphs, will lead you surely and inevitably to a thought upon Culture which, in its vividness, will obliterate with one flash all the meandering gossip, all the irresponsible chatter, all the nonsense and pompous pedantry that you have ever heard pronounced and ever seen written upon that sacred word. Gradually it will dawn upon you that Culture is precisely the object of your once desperate search; you will know that it is that creation of man and subtle contrivance of his genius, whereby he tries not only to perpetuate, not only to enshrine, and not only to multiply his rare and

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exceptional fellow-men and moments; but that it is also the means whereby he guarantees a crop of these rare and exceptional men and moments to the future and to posterity.
        And you will also realise that this same Culture, if it is to be valuable, fruitful and glorious, must be something very different and apart from that idealistic, cowardly and one-sided cultivation of mild, tame, temperate and negative virtues, which is the practice and aspiration of all modern society and civilisation. You will know that an emotion, or a sensation, has not only quantity, but also quality, and that its greatest quality to us feeling natures, and that which seduces us most to the love of it, is undoubtedly its depth. Deep feeling alone can give you that thrill, that titillation of all your nerves, of which the rare and exceptional moment in your dream allowed you to taste. But depth is not to be found in the mild, tame, tolerant and shifting passions or virtues of modern times; consequently there is less joy abroad and a weaker love of life. Only on deep passions and on deep virtues will you therefore wish to base the Culture which is to enshrine your rare men and moments. But you will not hesitate to see, of course, that this love of depth, this enthusiastic rearing of fierce and positive virtues and passions, involves the condonation of much which is not always compatible with peace and with a humdrum existence of back-parlour comfort and propriety. You will know that deep positive virtues, if thwarted, if checked, show the same violence in their obverse manifestations as they do in their unthwarted and unchecked progress. Nevertheless, you are no longer idealistic, you, who have suffered from the irrevocable loss of a rare and exceptional feeling, cannot afford to be idealistic and romantic. You are prepared to face all the evil of your choice in manhood, provided you get what you regard as the good.
        Willy nilly you will have beauty back again; you will have beauty a more constant quality in your external world and in the world of your own emotions. And since you

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want those rare moments again which depend upon positive virtues for their existence, your aim is to rear lofty positive virtues. You see as plainly as if the fact were written in unmistakable letters across your path, that all one-sided breeding and rearing of squeamish ideals of what a man and a woman should be, although it leads to smug security and ease, is steadily eliminating all greatness and all character from your world of friends and companions. Therefore you say, and with a full knowledge of the undoubted risks you run: "In Heaven's name let great omnipotent desire and the great positive virtues it breeds, be once again the aim and justification of Culture; for, even if the recoil stroke of the pendulum bear some men into a kind of perdition, the dire blackness of which even the most adventurous and most intrepid of to-day could not picture successfully, what matters it provided in its upstroke the pendulum of life leads into ecstasies of which no one, not even the best nowadays, can have a remote inkling, save once, perhaps, in a rare and unrepeated dream, which he is subsequently at an absolute loss to recall?"
        And, if you are in earnest about this matter; if you feel that mankind, like yourself, will soon have no other alternative than to search with ever diminishing visual power, hungrily, thirstingly, frantically, bravely, for the rich deep beauties it once possessed, simply because, despite the fact that they brought a profounder and cleaner sort of tragedy in their train than present conditions do, they alone made life possible and desirable; your next question will be: What are the values, the particular moral code and table of virtues and vices which are associated with these rich and deep virtues? At what time in the history of mankind have they prevailed? How can they be made to prevail again?
        And do not suppose that this is by any means either a hopeless or a fantastic investigation. On the contrary, the material for its accomplishment lies already to hand, all ready garnered and stored safely away. It is even full of the richest rewards for all those who are curious enough,

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intrepid enough, desperate and sad enough, to undertake it with energy and perseverance. But it demands two qualities that are becoming and will continue to grow ever more and more exceptional and rare as time goes on. I refer to independence on the one hand, and to health on the other: the independence of thought and of deed that does not mind for a while at least incurring the suspicion even of disreputability or dirt; and the health that knows how — that cannot help knowing how — to digest or to vomit up at the right time and in the nick of time.
        Those who are young enough and brave enough will understand what I mean. And it is to the young man that I particularly address this treatise. Old men, or men of middle age, already owe a debt of gratitude to their opinions, however erroneous they may be; they already feel that if they have travelled so far, it is to their opinions and to their particular view of things that they owe the successful accomplishment of the stages of the journey. The young, however, have not yet any such bond of gratitude fastening them to their particular views. If these happen to be erroneous, therefore, they can abandon them with more freedom and with less regret. That is why it is to them that I make my appeal; and them in conclusion whom I remind of Disraeli's fine and stirring words: "We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can no longer be synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of the Nation are the trustees of Posterity." 1

        1 Sybil, p. 88.

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