and
interesting place, that their horizon extends, and they apply to other
people, to their relationships and meetings, the zest and interest that
they formerly applied only to themselves. The kind of temperament that
falls a helpless victim to dramatic egotism is generally the priggish
and self-satisfied man, who has a fervent belief in his own influence,
and the duty of exercising it on others. Most of us, one may say
gratefully, are kept humble by our failures and even by our sins. If the
path of the transgressor is hard, the path of the righteous man is
often harder. If a man is born free from grosser temptations, vigorous,
active, robust, the chances are ten to one that he falls into the snare
of self-righteousness and moral complacency. He passes judgment
on others, he compares himself favourably with them. A spice of
unpopularity gives him a still more fatal bias, because he thinks that
he is persecuted for his goodness, when he is only disliked for his
superiority. He becomes content to warn people, and if they reject his
advice and get into difficulties, he is not wholly ill-pleased. Whereas
the diffident person, who tremblingly assumes the responsibility for
some one else's life, is beset by miserable regrets if his penitent
escapes him, and attributes it to his own mismanagement. The truth is
that moral indignation is a luxury that very few people can afford to
indulge in. And if it is true that a rich man can with difficulty enter
the kingdom of heaven, it is also true that the dramatic man finds it
still more difficult. He is impervious to criticism, because he bears
it with meekness. He has so good a conscience that he cannot believe
himself in the wrong. If he makes an egregious blunder, he says
to himself with infinite solemnity that it is right that his
self-satisfaction should be tenderly purged away, and glories in his own
humility. A far wholesomer frame of mind is that of the philosopher
who said, when complimented on the mellowness that advancing years had
brought him, that he still reserved to himself the right of damning
things in general. Because the truth is that the things which really
discipline us are the painful, dreary, intolerable things of life, the
results of one's own meanness, stupidity, and weakness, or the black
catastrophes which sometimes overwhelm us, and not the things which we
piously and cheerfully accept as ministering to our consciousness of
worth and virtue.

If I say that