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Updated: May 22, 2025
Could he not at any time quit the service directly he became convinced of its ineffectiveness? To-day's experience was simply a fresh weight in the scales of his doubt. He had once more determined to apply all his strength to the solution of a problem, which had been in his mind even at the time of his employment in Berlin.
He realized that if he wished to accomplish anything for the country his business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice. This was the choice that he made in those first days, the companionable road of practical idealism rather than the isolated peak of idealistic ineffectiveness.
The administration of justice was, by its corruption and its ineffectiveness in the punishment of crime, a disgrace to the country. These were matters of public scandal, calling clearly for public agitation and reform; but in matters of private and domestic life the ministers should have been content with exhortation and example as their means of reformation.
But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic and artistic anaemia and insufficiency, the opposite of what we find showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault.
But he did not feel godlike when through the telescope he watched great leaping flames go climbing up some giant pine, eating away its very life as they climbed; he was filled then with a blind, helpless rage at his own ineffectiveness, and he would stand and wonder why God refused to send the rain that would save these wonderful, living things, the trees.
There lay the secret of a certain ineffectiveness in his character. For he did not realise that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causative agent everywhere and always. 'Behind Will stands Desire, and Desire is Action. And if he had accomplished this, how was it done? Not by preaching, certainly.
Later in his work Gordon gives a case in point, in his vivid description of a bayonet charge upon the line under his command on the bloody field of Antietam. This is well worth repeating as an illustration of the modern ineffectiveness of the bayonet, and also as a story of thrilling interest in itself.
Britling's mind that while he was deploring his inefficiency in regard to his son, he was also deploring the ineffectiveness of all his generation of parents. Quite insensibly his mind passed over to the generalised point of view. In his talks with Mr. Direck, Mr. Britling could present England as a great and amiable spectacle of carelessness and relaxation, but was it indeed an amiable spectacle?
But, though suspected, the ineffectiveness of that squadron could not be assumed before proved.
Their ineffectiveness in conveying ideas is at once plain, for though "a man" conveys two ideas, such are not expressed by the vowels, which are identical, while "e" and "i" are common to too many words of one syllable to serve any useful purpose, alone, in the conveyance of definite ideas. The consonants at once mark off the limitations; they fence around the ideas, so to speak.
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