ype of the beauty and glory of the world which we love so well,--as
we exult in all the pleasure and exaltation of spirit which goes with
these things, so we set ourselves to bear the sorrow which not unseldom
goes with them also; remembering those lines of the ancient poet (I quote
roughly from memory one of the many translations of the nineteenth
century):

'For this the Gods have fashioned man's grief and evil day
That still for man hereafter might be the tale and the lay.'

Well, well, 'tis little likely anyhow that all tales shall be lacking, or
all sorrow cured."

He was silent for some time, and I would not interrupt him. At last he
began again: "But you must know that we of these generations are strong
and healthy of body, and live easily; we pass our lives in reasonable
strife with nature, exercising not one side of ourselves only, but all
sides, taking the keenest pleasure in all the life of the world. So it
is a point of honour with us not to be self-centred; not to suppose that
the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think
it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of
sentiment and sensibility: we are no more inclined to eke out our
sentimental sorrows than to cherish our bodily pains; and we recognise
that there are other pleasures besides love-making. You must remember,
also, that we are long-lived, and that therefore beauty both in man and
woman is not so fleeting as it was in the days when we were burdened so
heavily by self-inflicted diseases. So we shake off these griefs in a
way which perhaps the sentimentalists of other times would think
contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manlike. As
on the other hand, therefore, we have ceased to be commercial in our love-
matters, so also we have ceased to be _artificially_ foolish. The folly
which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, or the older man
caught in a trap, we must put up with that, nor are we much ashamed of
it; but to be conventionally sensitive or sentimental--my friend, I am
old and perhaps disappointed, but at least I think we have cast off
_some_ of the follies of the older world."

He paused, as if for some words of mine; but I held my peace: then he
went on: "At least, if we suffer from the tyranny and fickleness of
nature or our own want of experience, we neither grimace about it, nor
lie. If there must be sundering betwixt those who meant n