the professional struggle with life, the essence of which is often
social pretentiousness, is different. It ends in a mournful and
distracted kind of fatigue, a tired sort of padding along after
life, a timid bewilderment at conditions which one cannot alter,
and which yet have no dignity or seemliness.

What is there that is wrong with all this? The cause is easy enough
to analyse. It is the result of a system which develops
conventional, short-sighted, complicated households, averse to
effort, fond of pleasure, and with tastes which are expensive
without being refined. The only cure would seem to be that men and
women should be born different, with simple active generous
natures; it is easy to say that! But the worst of the situation is
that the sordid banality and ugly tragedy of their lot do not dawn
on the people concerned. Greedy vanity in the more robust, lack of
moral courage and firmness in the more sensitive, with a social
organisation that aims at a surface dignity and a cheap showiness,
are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is
that it has no fine elements at all. There is a nobility about real
tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion.
There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a
desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can
hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down the
muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery
battling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless and
unintelligible destiny, seems to have in it no seed of recovery at
all.

The dark shadow of professional anxiety is that it has no tragic
quality; it is like ploughing on day by day through endless mud-