criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as
mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent
endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be
defective. It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put
in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly
blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--

"Enough we live:--and if a life,
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth."

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch.
For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not
the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which
we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger
to neutralise each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a
fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe
at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage,
to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we
demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get
it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to
think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without
once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without
once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist
and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is
he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to
die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist