was golden
with buttercups, the foliage was rich upon the trees. The water bubbled
pleasantly in the great pool, and an old house thrust a pretty gable out
over lilacs clubbed with purple bloom. The beauty of the place was put
to my lips, like a cup of the waters of comfort. The sadness was the
drift of human life out of sweet places such as this, into the town
that overflowed the meadows with its avenues of mean houses, where the
railway station, with its rows of stained trucks, its cindery floor, its
smoking engines, buzzed and roared with life.

But the pessimism of one who sees the simple life fading out, the
ancient quietude invaded, the country caught in the feelers of the
town, is not a real pessimism at all, or rather it is a pessimism
which results from a deficiency of imagination, and is only a matter of
personal taste, perhaps of personal belatedness. Twelve generations of
my own family lived and died as Yorkshire yeomen-farmers, and my own
preference is probably a matter of instinctive inheritance. The point is
not what a few philosophers happen to like, but what humanity likes, and
what it is happiest in liking. I should have but small confidence in the
Power that rules the world, if I did not believe that the vast social
development of Europe, its civilisation, its network of communications,
its bustle, its tenser living, its love of social excitement was not
all part of a great design. I do not believe that humanity is perversely
astray, hurrying to destruction. I believe rather that it is working
out the possibilities that lie within it; and if human beings had been
framed to live quiet pastoral lives, they would be living them still.
The one question for the would-be optimist is whether humanity is
growing nobler, wiser, more unselfish; and of that I have no doubt
whatever. The sense of equality, of the rights of the weak, compassion,
brotherliness, benevolence, are living ideas, throbbing with life; the
growth of the power of democracy, much as it may tend to inconvenience
one personally, is an entirely hopeful and desirable thing; and if a
man is disposed to pessimism, he ought to ask himself seriously to what
extent his pessimism is conditioned by his own individual prospect of
happiness. It is quite possible to conceive of a man without any hope of
personal immortality, or the continuance of individual identity, whose
future might be clouded, say, by his being the victim of a painful and
incurable d