y
not so very far from the truth. The germ of the sense of moral beauty is
there, and it only wants patience and endeavour to make it grow. But it
cannot be all done in any single life, of course; that is where the
human faith fails, in its limitations of a man's possibilities to a
single life."

"But what is the reason," I said, "why the morality, the high austerity
of some persons, who are indubitably high-minded and pure-hearted, is so
utterly discouraging and even repellent?"

"Ah," he said, "there you touch on a great truth. The reason of that is
that these have but a sterile sort of connoisseur-ship in virtue. Virtue
cannot be attained in solitude, nor can it be made a matter of private
enjoyment. The point is, of course, that it is not enough for a man to
be himself; he must also give himself; and if a man is moral because of
the delicate pleasure it brings him--and the artistic pleasure of
asceticism is a very high one--he is apt to find himself here in very
strange and distasteful company. In this, as in everything, the only
safe motive is the motive of love. The man who takes pleasure in using
influence, or setting a lofty example, is just as arid a dilettante as
the musician who plays, or the artist who paints, for the sake of the
applause and the admiration he wins; he is only regarding others as so
many instruments for registering his own level of complacency. Every
one, even the least complicated of mankind, must know the exquisite
pleasure that comes from doing the simplest and humblest service to one
whom he loves; how such love converts the most menial office into a
luxurious joy; and the higher that a man goes, the more does he discern
in every single human being with whom he is brought into contact a soul
whom he can love and serve. Of course it is but an elementary pleasure
to enjoy pleasing those whom we regard with some passion of affection,
wife or child or friend, because, after all, one gains something oneself
by that. But the purest morality of all discerns the infinitely lovable
quality which is in the depth of every human soul, and lavishes its
tenderness and its grace upon it, with a compassion that grows and
increases, the more unthankful and clumsy and brutish is the soul which
it sets out to serve."

"But," I said, "beautiful as that thought is--and I see and recognise
its beauty--it does limit the individual responsibility very greatly.
Surely a prudential morality, the morality which