mystify and provoke
the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion, and
professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment. The
hideous vulgarity of his attitude is not at first sight apparent; he
deceives the heroine, who is a considerable heiress, into thinking that
here, at last, is a man who is living a quiet and sincere life among the
things of the soul; and having obtained possession of her purse, he sets
up house in a dignified old palace in Rome, where he continues to amuse
himself by inviting distinguished persons to visit him, in order that he
may have the pleasure of excluding the lesser people who would like to
be included.

This is, of course, doing the thing upon an almost sublime scale; but
the fact remains that in an age which values notoriety above everything
except property, a great many people do suffer from the disease of not
enjoying things, unless they are aware that others envy their enjoyment.
To people of an artistic temperament this is a sore temptation, because
the essence of the artistic temperament is its egotism, and egotism,
like the Bread-and-butter fly, requires a special nutriment, the
nutriment of external admiration.

And here, I think, lies one of the pernicious results of an
over-developed system of athletics. The more games that people play, the
better; but I do not think it is wholesome to talk about them for large
spaces of leisure time, any more than it is wholesome to talk about your
work or your meals. The result of all the talk about athletics is that
the newspapers get full of them too. That is only natural. It is the
business of newspapers to find out what interests people, and to
tell them about it; but the bad side of it is that young athletes get
introduced to the pleasures of publicity, and that ambitious young
men think that athletics are a short cut to fame. To have played in a
University eleven is like accepting a peerage; you wear for the rest of
your life an agreeable and honourable social label, and I do not think
that a peerage is deserved, or should be accepted, at the age of twenty.
I do not think it is a good kind of fame which depends on a personal
performance rather than upon a man's usefulness to the human race.

The kind of contentment that I should like to see on the increase is the
contentment of a man who works hard and enjoys work, both in itself and
in the contrast it supplies to his leisure hours; and, further, whose
le