esult of it was to make one, as
experience widened and deepened, mournfully indifferent to an ideal
which seemed so utterly out of one's reach. It is very difficult to
make the right compromise. On the one hand, there is the sense of moral
responsibility and effort, which one desires to cultivate; on the other
hand, truth compels us to recognise our limitations, and to confess
boldly the fact that moral improvement is a very difficult thing. The
question is whether, in dealing with other people, we will declare what
we believe to be the truth, or whether we will tamper with the truth
for a good motive. Ought we to pretend that we think a person morally
responsible and morally culpable, when we believe that he is neither,
for the sake of trying to improve him?

My own practice now is to waste as little time as possible in
ineffectual regrets, but to keep alive as far as I can in my heart a
hope, a desire, that God will help to bring me nearer to the ideal that
I can perceive and cannot reach. To-day, turning over the pages of the
old Manual, with its fantastic strained phrases staring at me from the
page, I cannot help wishing that some wise and tender person had been
able to explain to me the conditions as I now see them. Probably the
thing was incommunicable; one must learn for oneself both one's
bitterness and one's joy.

May 2, 1889.

It sometimes happens to me--I suppose it happens to every one--to hear
some well-meaning person play or sing at a party. Last night, at the
Simpsons', a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang some
Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive voice,
accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion--the whole thing
might have been turned out by a machine. I was, I suppose, in a fretful
mood. "Good God!" I thought to myself, "what is the meaning of this
woeful performance?--a party of absurd dressed-up people, who have
eaten and drunk too much, sitting in a circle in this hot room
listening gravely to this lugubrious performance! And this is the best
that Schubert can do! This is the real Schubert! Here have I been all
my life pouring pints of subjective emotion into this dreary writer of
songs, believing that I was stirred and moved, when it was my own hopes
and aspirations all along, which I was stuffing into this conventional
vehicle, just as an ecclesiastical person puts his emotion into the
grotesque repetitions of a liturgy." I thought to myself that