f conscious growth. I say again that
what we need and profit by is experience, and sometimes that comes by
suffering, helpless, dreary, apparently meaningless suffering. Yet when
pain subsides, do we ever, does any one ever wish the suffering had not
befallen us? I think not. We feel better, stronger, more pure, more
serene for it. Sometimes we get experience by living what seems to be
an uncongenial life. One cannot solve the problem of happiness by
simply trying to turn out of one's life whatever is uncongenial. Life
cannot be made into an Earthly Paradise, and it injures one's soul even
to try. What we can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful,
conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life,
though one may mistake even that sometimes. One of the commonest
mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague sense
that they ought to DO GOOD, as they say. The best that most people can
do is to perform their work and their obvious duties well and
conscientiously.

If we realise that experience is what we need, and not necessarily
happiness or contentment, the whole value of life is altered. We see
then that we can get as much or even more out of the futile hour when
we are held back from our chosen delightful work, even out of the
dreary or terrified hour, when the sense of some irrevocable neglect,
some base surrender that has marred our life, sinks burning into the
soul, as a hot ember sinks smoking into a carpet. Those are the hours
of life when we move and climb; not the hours when we work, and eat,
and laugh, and chat, and dine out with a sense of well-merited content.

The value of life is not to be measured by length of days or success or
tranquillity, but by the quality of our experience, and the degree in
which we have profited by it. In the light of such a truth as this, art
seems to fade away as just a pleasant amusement contrived by leisurely
men for leisurely men.

Then, further, one grows to feel that such easy happiness as comes to
us may be little more than the sweetening of the bitter medicine, just
enough to give us courage and heart to live on; that applies, of
course, only to the commoner sorts of happiness, when one is busy and
merry and self-satisfied. Some sorts of happiness, such as the best
kind of affection, are parts of the larger experience.

Then, if we take hold of such experience in the right way, welcoming it
as far as possible, not resistin