a great deal of truth in this, and it is manfully put. Where
it fails is, I think, in assuming an amount of will-power and
resolution in human character, which I suspect is not there. The system
the writer recommends is a system that a strong character instinctively
practises, moving through sentiment to emotion, naturally, and by a
sturdy growth. But to tell a man to feel more in a thing, is like
telling a man to be intelligent, benevolent, wise. It is just what no
one can do. The various grades of emotion are not things like
examinations, in which one can successively graduate. They are
expressions of temperament. The sentimental man is the man who can go
thus far and no farther. How shall one acquire vigour and generosity?
By behaving as if one was vigorous and generous, when one is neither? I
do not think it can be done in that way. One can do something to check
a tendency, very little to deepen it. What the writer calls false
asceticism is the only brave and wholesome refuge of people, who know
themselves well enough to know that they cannot trust themselves. Take
the case of one's relations with other people. If a man drifts into
sentimental relations with other people, attracted by charm of any
kind, and knowing quite well that the relation is built on charm, and
that he will not be able to follow it into truer regions, I think he
had probably better try to keep himself in check, not embrace a
sentimental relation with a mild hope that it may develop into a real
devotion. The strong man may try experiments, even though he burns his
fingers. The weak man had better not meddle with the instruments and
fiery fluids at all.

I am myself just strong enough to dislike sentiment, to turn faint in
the sickly, mawkish air. But I am not strong enough to charge it with
vivid life. Moreover, the danger of a strong character taking up the
anti-ascetic position is that he is apt to degenerate into a man like
Goethe, who plucked the fragrant blooms on every side, and threw them
relentlessly away when he had inhaled their sweetness. That is a cruel
business, unless there is a very wise and tender heart behind.

Yet again, reconsidering the whole problem, I am not sure that the
whole suggestion, taken as advice, is not at fault. I think it is
making a melancholy, casuistical, ethical business out of what ought to
be a natural process. I think it is vitiated by a principle which
vitiates so much of the advice of moralists, the pr