|
|
|
|
|
|
56 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING
loyalty into license, protection into plunder, truth into treachery, chivalry into selfishness; and, since his time, the purest impulses and the noblest purposes have perhaps been oftener stayed by the devil, under the name of Quixotism, than under any other base name or false allegation.1
33. Quixotism, or Utopianism; that is another of the devil’s pet words. I believe the quiet admission which we are all of us so ready to make, that, because things have long been wrong, it is impossible they should ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this world suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware of that man. Cast the word out of your dictionary altogether.2 There is no need for it. Things are either possible or impossible-you can easily determine which, in any given state of human science. If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it. It is very Utopian to hope for the entire doing away with drunkenness and misery out of the Canongate; but the Utopianism is not our business-the work is. It is Utopian to hope to give every child in this kingdom the knowledge of God from its youth; but the Utopianism is not our business-the work is.
34. I have delayed you by the consideration of these two words, only in the fear that they might be inaccurately applied to the plans I am going to lay before you; for, though they were Utopian, and though they were romantic, they might be none the worse for that. But they are neither. Utopian they are not; for they are merely a proposal to do again what has been done for hundreds of years by people whose wealth and power were as nothing compared to ours;-and romantic they are not, in the sense of
1 [Compare, for similar references to Don Quixote, Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. § 29, and Præterita, i. § 68.]
2 [Compare p. 432, below; Fors Clavigera, Letters 7 and 8; and Arrows of the Chace, 1880, vol. ii. pp. 110, 155.]
|
|
|
[Version 0.04: March 2008]
