. It is no use
holding up an ideal which cannot be attained, and which the mere attempt
to attain is fruitful in disaster and discontent.

I do not at all wish to teach a gospel of dulness. I am of the opinion
of the poet who said:

"Life is not life at all without delight,
Nor hath it any might."

But I am quite sure that the real pleasures of the world are those which
cannot be bought for money, and which are wholly independent of success.

Every one who has watched children knows the extraordinary amount of
pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials. To keep
a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are pebbles and
thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are paid for in daisies,
will be an engrossing occupation to healthy children for a long summer
afternoon. There is no reason why that kind of zest should not be
imported into later life; and, as a matter of fact, people who practise
self-restraint, who are temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind
of contentment in all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age;
it is the jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus
of excitement to carry them along from hour to hour. Who does not
remember the rigid asceticism of Ruskin's childhood? A bunch of keys
to play with, and a little later a box of bricks; the Bible and The
Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe to read; a summary whipping if
he fell down and hurt himself, or if he ever cried. Yet no one
would venture to say that this austerity in any way stunted Ruskin's
development or limited his range of pleasures; it made him perhaps a
little submissive and unadventurous. But who that ever saw him, as the
most famous art-critic of the day, being mercilessly snubbed, when he
indulged in paradoxes, by the old wine-merchant, or being told to hold
his tongue by the grim old mother, and obeying cheerfully and sweetly,
would have preferred him to have been loud, contradictory, and
self-assertive? The mischief of our present system of publicity is that
we cannot enjoy our own ideas, unless we can impress people with them,
or, at all events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them.
There is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry
James's novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish
dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a
great position, devotes himself to trying to