THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

52 The Harmony of Virtuethe elimination of all that is vivid and picturesque and likely tofoster a personality. Evolution does not eliminate but perfects.Wilson: But surely perfection tends to eliminate what is imperfect?Keshav: Oh I don't deny that we have lost our tails, but sohas a Man?: cat.Treneth: Dear me! that is a fruitful idea. A dissertation provingthat the Manx cat is the crowning effort of Evolution might getme a Fellowship.Keshav: It would deserve it for its originality. Moreover ifwe have lost our tails, we have also lost our wings.Treneth: I maintain that the tails are the more serious loss.Wings would have been useful and we do not want them but wedo want tails, for they would have been lovely appendages anda magnificent final flourish to the beauty of the human figure.Just fancy the Dean and Provost pacing up to the CommunionTable with a fine long tail swishing about their ears! What a gloriouslesson! What a sublime and instructive spectacle!Wilson: You are incorrigibly frivolous, Treneth.Keshav: If Prince Paradox is frivolous, he is virtuous, insofaras he is developing the virtue most intimately native to hispersonality; and the inquiry is dull enough at present to bearoccasional touches of enlivening laughter.Wilson: Yet the inquiry must pass through stifling under-groundgalleries and to avoid them is puerile.Keshav: I am at one with you, but if we must dive underthe ground, there is no need to linger there.Evolution does not eliminate, but perfects. The cruelty thatblossoms out in the tiger, has its seeds deep down in the natureof man and if it is minimised in one generation will expandin another, nor is it possible for man to eradicate crueltywithout pulling up in the same moment the bleeding roots ofhis own being. Yet the brute ferocity that in the tiger is gracefuland just and artistic, is in the man savage and crude andinharmonious and must be cultured and refined, until it becomesa virtue and fits as gracefully and harmlessly into the perfectcharacter, as its twin-brother physical courage, and physical love,its remote relative.