is cannot be overcome by repression; it can only
be overcome by tenderness. There are very few people who have not the
elements of this in their character. I can count upon my fingers the
malevolent men I know, who prefer making others uncomfortable to trying
to make them glad; and all these men have been bullied in their youth,
and are unconsciously protecting themselves against bullying still. We
grow selfish, no doubt, for want of practice; ill-health makes villains
of some of us. But we can learn, if we desire it, to keep our gruffness
for our own consumption, and a very few experiments will soon convince
us that there are few pleasures in the world so reasonable and so cheap,
as the pleasure of giving pleasure.

But, after all, the resolute cheerfulness that can be to a certain
extent captured and secured by an effort of the will, though it is
perhaps a more useful quality than natural joy, and no doubt ranks
together in the moral scale, is not to be compared with a certain
unreasoning, incommunicable rapture which sometimes, without conscious
effort or desire, descends upon the spirit, like sunshine after rain.
Let me quote a recent experience of my own which may illustrate it.

A few days ago, I had a busy tiresome morning hammering into shape a
stupid prosaic passage, of no suggestiveness; a mere statement, the only
beauty of which could be that it should be absolutely lucid; and this
beauty it resolutely refused to assume. Then the agent called to see me,
and we talked business of a dull kind. Then I walked a little way among
fields; and when I was in a pleasant flat piece of ground, full of
thickets, where the stream makes a bold loop among willows and alders,
the sun set behind a great bastion of clouds that looked like a huge
fortification. It had been one of those days of cloudless skies, all
flooded with the pale cold honey-coloured light of the winter sun, until
a sense almost of spring came into the air; and in a sheltered place I
found a little golden hawk-weed in full flower.

It had not been a satisfactory day at all to me. The statement that I
had toiled so hard all the morning to make clear was not particularly
worth making; it could effect but little at best, and I had worked at
it in a British doggedness of spirit, regardless of its value and only
because I was determined not to be beaten by it.

But for all that I came home in a rare and delightful frame of mind, as
if I had heard a brief and