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'That message, he said, resuming his place on the couch, 'is a last word on the tragedy, and will, no doubt, produce some modification in the final stage of its history. And now, Shiel, let us sit together and confer on this matter. From the manner in which you have expressed yourself, it is evident that there are points which puzzle you you do not get a clean coup d'oeil of the whole regiment of facts, and their causes, and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out of that confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry. A great wrong is done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task of making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of punishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to the occasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque, does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Now this, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful I mean, not very in itself, but very in its significance: and there must be a precise cause for it. That cause is the lack of something not merely, or specially, in the investigators of the wrong, but in the world at large shall we not boldly call it the lack of culture? Do not, however, misunderstand me: by the term I mean not so much attainment in general, as mood in particular. Whether or when such mood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt. As for me, I often think that when the era of civilisation begins as assuredly it shall some day begin when the races of the world cease to be credulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will be the ushering in of the ten thousand years of a clairvoyant culture. But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years that man has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of its presence. In individuals, yes in the Greek Plato, and I think in your English Milton and Bishop Berkeley but in humanity, never; and hardly in any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, is not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course, conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first requisite to a régime of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious person he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at novelty once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty civilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. A certain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regarded his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means anything, can only mean the art by which men live musically together to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, to triumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formula defining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled," should surely at this hour be too primitive too Opic to bring anything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and the very fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptance in all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: idéa] which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed far, perhaps, by ages and aeons from becoming part of the general conception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of living ever so much as approached solution, much less the delicate and intricate one of living together:
He was a fair-haired young giant, white-skinned and well-featured, but dull, looking, with cold, hard eyes suggesting the barbarian that he was considered by the cultured Neapolitans, and that he certainly looked by contrast with them.
He had not eaten a bite since early morning, and now it was eleven o'clock at night. It appalled him to think of entering a restaurant and being confronted by one of those white-skinned, slim-formed divinities he saw flitting from table to table. He did not know what to order nor how to order it.
The child woke as joyous as a bird. Hand in hand the quaint-looking pair a seeming Indian with a little white-skinned child in a flannel nightgown trudged patiently up the stream, till in the middle of the afternoon they came to a spot where Pierre thought it safe to wade across.
Up the beach was his hut I have seen many a stye a king to it and in the doorway his wife must I call her? Curious I suppose like all her sex she came down the strand to get a look at the white-skinned, light-haired stranger, and was rewarded for temerity in a most summary manner.
His flesh had surely died with his childhood's innocent romance, that white-skinned girl with golden hair, whom now he never beheld otherwise than stretched upon her couch of suffering, her flesh as lifeless as his own. And he had afterwards made the sacrifice of his mind, which he then fancied even an easier one, hoping as he did that determination would suffice to prevent him from thinking.
They went, walking with their arms entwined as other girls were doing, Julia between the broad, white-skinned sisters, like a rapier between cushions. The two younger girls ran on in front. "There is Mevrouw," they cried. "She is calling us. The carriage is ready, too; oh, do you think it is already time to go?" It seemed as if it really was the case.
How could it be otherwise? He had committed what was to him sacrilege, sunk his fangs into the holy flesh of a god, and of a white-skinned superior god at that. In the nature of things, and of intercourse with gods, something terrible awaited him. The god sat down several feet away. White Fang could see nothing dangerous in that. When the gods administered punishment they stood on their legs.
She will like you because the Jews always sense talent, and," he added ironically, "they admire certain qualities of feeling that are found only in the white-skinned races." Thea looked into the young man's face as the light of a street lamp flashed into the carriage. His somewhat academic manner amused her. "What makes you take such an interest in singers?" she asked curiously.
Her slices of fried ham formed an attractive nest for the white-skinned poached eggs. She had plates of curly oatcake and powdery farles. She had yellow butter in saucers. She brought the porridge to table in well-scoured wooden bowls with horn spoons in them. "The stirabout is good," she said. "I thought you'd like to sup them before you ate the meat."
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