HERBERT. The question is, whether toleration is anything but
indifference.
THE PARSON. Everything is tolerated now but Christian orthodoxy.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of
external achievements, but I take it that real progress ought to be
in man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what
he can produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years
ago. The best paintings are several centuries old. We study the
finest architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are
Shakespeare, Homer, Isaiah, and David. The latest of the arts,
music, culminated in composition, though not in execution, a century
ago.
THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the
civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for
the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically
incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take
a long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is
growth toward him, and not away from him, and when the average
culture has reached his height, some other genius will still more
profoundly and delicately express the highest thoughts.
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