VI.


Of how many dwellings can it be said that no word of anger is ever heard
beneath its roof, and that no unkindly feeling ever exists between the
inmates? Most men's experience would seem to justify them in declaring
that, throughout the inhabited world, no such house exists. I, knowing
at all events of one, admit the possibility that there may be more; yet I
feel that it is to hazard a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to
any other instance, nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has
quitted the world) could I have named a single example.

It is so difficult for human beings to live together; nay, it is so
difficult for them to associate, however transitorily, and even under the
most favourable conditions, without some shadow of mutual offence.
Consider the differences of task and of habit, the conflict of
prejudices, the divergence of opinions (though that is probably the same
thing), which quickly reveal themselves between any two persons brought
into more than casual contact, and think how much self-subdual is
implicit whenever, for more than an hour or two, they co-exist in seeming
harmony. Man is not made for peaceful intercourse with his fellows; he
is by nature self-assertive, commonly aggressive, always critical in a
more or less hostile spirit of any characteristic which seems strange to
him. That he is capable of profound affections merely modifies here and
there his natural contentiousness, and subdues its expression. Even
love, in the largest and purest sense of the word, is no safeguard
against perilous irritation and sensibilities inborn. And what were the
durability of love without the powerful alliance of habit?