much, and won't be any more just yet. Some of it there will never be
for the sorry reason that our race won't bear to be told fundamental
facts about itself, still less about other orders of creation which
are sufficiently like our own to bring self-consciousness into play.
To write of the sexes in English you must either be sentimental or a
satirist. You must set the emotions to work; otherwise you must be
quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge; and there's a
reason why we have no fairy lore, because we can't keep our feelings
in hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and we
have none. Why is that? Because we can neither expound without wishing
to convert the soul, nor understand without self-experiment. We don't
want to know things, we want to feel them--and are ashamed of our
need. Mythology, therefore, we English must make for ourselves as we
can; and if we are wise we shall keep it to ourselves. It is a pity,
because since we alone of created things are not self-sufficient,
anything that seems to break down the walls of being behind which we
agonise would be a comfort to us; but there's a worse thing than being
in prison, and that is quarrelling with our own nature.

I shall have explained myself very badly if my reader leaves me with
the impression that I have been writing down marvels. The fact that a
thing occurs in nature takes it out of the portentous. There's nothing
either good or bad but thinking makes it so. With that I end.

* * * * *




CONTENTS