The mountains remained impassive; they were too indifferent to be even contemptuous. Humanity had only soiled their ankles: I could see all around that with all his jumping man had not found a perch higher than their ankles. It seemed to me painfully inept that humanity, having spent seven years in worming a hole through one of those mountains, should have filled the newspapers with the marvels of its hole, and should have fallen into the habit of calling its hole “the Simplon.” The Simplon—that hole! It seemed to me that the excellence of Swiss conscription was merely ridiculous in its exquisite unimportance. It seemed to me that I must have been absolutely mad to get myself excited about the January elections in a trifling isle called Britain, writing articles and pamphlets and rude letters, and estranging friends and thinking myself an earnest warrior in the van of progress. Land taxes! I could not look down, or up, and see land taxes as aught but an infantile invention of comic opera. Two Chambers or one! Veto first or Budget first! Mr. F. E. Smith or Mr. Steel-Maitland! Ah! The tea-cup and the storm!
The prescription of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had “acted.”
It is an exceedingly harmful prescription if employed long or often. Go to the top of a mountain by all means, but hurry down again quickly. The top of a mountain, instead of correcting your perspective, as is generally supported by philosophers for whom human existence is not good enough, falsifies it. Because it induces self-aggrandisement. You draw illusive bigness from the mountain. You imagine that you are august, but you are not. If the man below was informed by telephone that a being august was gazing on him from above he would probably squint his eyes upwards in the sunshine and assert with calmness that he couldn’t even see a living speck on the mountain-crest. You who have gone up had better come down. You couldn’t remain up twenty-four hours without the aid of the ant-like evolutions below, which you grandiosely despise. You couldn’t have got up at all if a procession of those miserable conceited ants had not been up there before you.
The detached philosophic mountain view of the littleness of things is a delightful and diverting amusement, and there is perhaps no harm in it so long as you don’t really act on it. If you begin really to act on it you at once become ridiculous, and especially ridiculous in the sight of mountains.
You commit the fatuity of despising the corporate toil which has made you what you are, and you prove nothing except that you have found a rather specious and glittering excuse for idleness, for cowardice, and for having permitted the stuffing to be knocked out of you.
When I hear a man say, when I hear myself say: “I’m sick of politics,” I always think: “What you want is six months in prison, or in a slum, or in a mine, or in a bakehouse, or in the skin of a woman. After that, we should see if you were sick of politics.” And when I hear a lot of people together say that they are sick of politics, then I am quite sure that politics are more than ever urgently in need of attention. It is at such moments that a man has an excellent opportunity of showing that he is a man.