flats. One does not feel, in the presence of sharp suffering or
bitter loss, that they ought not to exist. They are there, stern,
implacable, august; stately enemies, great combatants. There is a
significance about their very awfulness. One may fall before them,
but they pass like a great express train, roaring, flashing, things
deliberately and intently designed; but these dull failures which
seem not the outgrowth of anyone's fierce longing or wilful
passion, but of everyone's laziness and greediness and stupidity,
how is one to face them? It is the helpless death of the quagmire,
not the death of the fight or the mountain-top. Is there, we ask
ourselves, anything in the mind of God which corresponds to
comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so stagnant a stream
can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! One would rather have
tyranny or savagery than anything so gross and smug.

And yet we see high-spirited and ardent husbands drawn into this by
obstinate and vulgar-minded wives. We see fine-natured and
sensitive women engulfed in it by selfish and ambitious husbands.
The tendency is awfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not by
open combat, but by secret and dull persistence. And one sees too--
I have seen it many times--children of delicate and eager natures,
who would have flourished and expanded in more generous air, become
conventional and commonplace and petty, concerned about knowing the
right people and doing the right things, and making the same stupid
and paltry show, which deceives no one.

There is nothing for it but independence and simplicity and,
perhaps best of all, a love of beauty. William Morris asserted
passionately enough that art was the only cure for all this
dreariness--the love of beautiful sounds and sights and words; and