We have assumed, in the past, that these things and the likes of these are modifiable by nurture, and that where they cannot be cured they must be endured. But with the realisation that breeding can be, and eventually must be, controlled by social opinion, a new horizon has opened to civilisation, a new light has come into the world, the glimpse of a new Heaven is revealed.
Animals living in nature are everywhere beautiful; it is only among men that ugliness flourishes. Savages, nearly everywhere, are gracious and harmonious; it is only among the civilised that harshness and discord are permitted to prevail. Henry Ellis, in the narrative of his experiences in Hudson's Bay in the eighteenth century, tells how a party of Eskimo--a people peculiarly tender to their children--came to the English settlement, told heart-brokenly of hardship and famine so severe that one of the children had been eaten. The English only laughed and the indignant Eskimo went on their way. What savages anywhere in the world would have laughed? I recall seeing, years ago, a man enter a railway carriage, fling aside the rug a traveller had deposited to retain a corner seat and obstinately hold that seat. Would such a man be permitted to live among savages? If the eugenic ideals that are now floating before men's eyes never lead us to any Heaven at all, but merely discourage among us the generation of human creatures below the level of decent savagery, they will serve their turn.
_September_ 7.--The music of César Franck always brings before me a man who is seeking peace with himself and consolation with God, at a height, above the crowd, in isolation, as it were in the uppermost turret of a church tower. It recalls the memory of the unforgettable evening when Denyn played on the carillon at Malines, and from the canal side I looked up at the little red casement high in the huge Cathedral tower where the great player seemed to be breathing out his soul, in solitude, among the stars. Always when I hear the music of Franck--a Fleming, also, it may well be by no accident--I seem to be in contact with a sensitive and solitary spirit, absorbed in self-communion, weaving the web of its own Heaven and achieving the fulfilment of its own rapture.