For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark
Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard
scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo's
demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is
a moon of the sun, Newton's theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry Davy's
invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the
application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. It was
just the same in other subjects. Thus Nietzsche, by the two or three who
had come across his writings, was supposed to have been the first man
to whom it occurred that mere morality and legality and urbanity lead
nowhere, as if Bunyan had never written Badman. Schopenhauer was
credited with inventing the distinction between the Covenant of Grace
and the Covenant of Works which troubled Cromwell on his deathbed.
People talked as if there had been no dramatic or descriptive music
before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to
myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring
innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long
rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Moliere; and to
lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.
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