asure to see her your wife today."

BOOK THREE -- THE FASCINATION

1--"My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is"

In Clym Yeobright's face could be dimly seen the typical countenance
of the future. Should there be a classic period to art hereafter, its
Pheidias may produce such faces. The view of life as a thing to be put
up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early
civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution
of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted
as a new artistic departure. People already feel that a man who lives
without disturbing a curve of feature, or setting a mark of mental
concern anywhere upon himself, is too far removed from modern
perceptiveness to be a modern type. Physically beautiful men--the glory
of the race when it was young--are almost an anachronism now; and we may
wonder whether, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may
not be an anachronism likewise.

The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has
permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may
be called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their
Aeschylus imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned
revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we
uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in
by their operation.

The lineaments which will get embodied in ideals based upon this new
recognition will probably be akin to those of Yeobright. The observer's
eye was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by his face as a
page; not by what it was, but by what it recorded. His features were
attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common
become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple become
interesting in writing.

He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had
been chaos. That he would be successful in an original way, or that he
would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable. The
only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in
the circumstances amid which he was born.

Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighbouring yeomen,
the listener said, "Ah, Clym Yeobright--what is he doing now?" When the
instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is
felt that he will be found to be, like most of us, doing noth