"I'm not convinced that I am doing good here," Lord Henry rejoined sharply. "That's precisely the point." "But everybody says you are." "No doubt." Sir Joseph turned to his ivory paper-knife. He did not understand. "If it's doing good," Lord Henry added, "to salve the nervous wreckage that our unspeakable Western civilisation produces with every generation; if it's doing good to render the disastrous mess which we have made of human life possible for a few years longer, by bringing relief to the principal victims of it; then, indeed, I am a desirable member of society. But I question the whole thing. I question very much whether it can be doing good to help this hopeless condition of things to last one moment longer than it need." Sir Joseph glanced up a little anxiously. "Are you serious?" he enquired. Lord Henry sat down again. "Am I serious?" he scoffed. "Can you be serious, can you be sane, and expect me to think otherwise? But you have been a great success by means of the very system which is rotten and iniquitous to the core. How could you sympathise?" Sir Joseph stammered hopelessly that he was trying to sympathise. "You are no doubt convinced," Lord Henry continued, "that all you are witnessing to-day is what you would call Progress. And the further we recede from a true understanding of human life and its most vital needs, and the more we complicate the world and increase its machinery, the more persuaded you become of the reality of your illusion. How could it be otherwise?" Sir Joseph expostulated ineffectually, and Lord Henry continued: "Still, I am not a reformer," he said. "I do not wish to reform, even if I could. It is not only too late, things are also too desperate. What I chiefly want is to take refuge somewhere where humanity and its deepest needs are the subject of greater mastery, greater understanding; so that I can cease from being distracted by the immensity of modern error. No great intellect, no great creative power can exist in this country; because the moment it becomes conscious it is so obsessed by the shams and the shamelessness that surround it, that instead of devoting itself to the joys and enrichment of life, it feels impelled by the horrors on every side to take up the social system and attempt to put it right. This sterile pitfall is now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,--what did they do? Menaced by this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual annihilation if they attempted to straighten out the muddle of modernity, they fled, or drowned themselves in water or opium."