but
I should imagine he must have been ready to quit the world in a
veritable ecstasy of wild passion and contempt.

If we take away the literature of love and the literature of fear, we
have but little left save the endless works that harp on one
theme--the remorseless savagery of civilised men toward those who
fail, or are supposed to fail, in life's grim warfare.

"Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot!
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy tooth is not so sharp
As friend remembered not!"

Those lines are hackneyed until every poetaster can quote them or
parody them at will; but very few readers consider that the bitter
verse summarises a whole literature. From Homer to Tennyson the ugly
tune has been played on all strings; and mankind have such a vivid
perception of the truth uttered by the satirists, that they read the
whole story with gusto whenever it is put into a fresh form--and each
man thinks that he at least is not one of those for whom the poet's
lash is meant. Novel, essay, poem, play, and sermon--all recur with
steady persistence to one ancient topic; and yet men try their best to
bring themselves low, as they might if Job, Shakspere, Congreve, and
Tennyson had never written at all, and as though no warnings were
being actually enacted all round, as on a stage.

Sometimes I wonder whether the majority of men ever really try to
conceive what it is to be down until their fate is upon them. I can
hardly think it. It has been well said that all of us know we shall
die, but none of us believe it. The idea of the dark plunge is
unfamiliar to the healthy imagination; and the majority of our race go
on as if the great change were only a fable devised by foolish poets
to scare children. I believe that, if all men were vouchsafed a sudden
comprehension of the real meaning of death, sin would cease.
Furthermore, I am persuaded that if every man could see in a flash the
burning history of the one who is down, the whole of our reasonable
population would take thought for the morrow--drink-shops would be
closed, the dice-box would rattle no more, and the sight of a genuine
idler would be unknown. Not a few of us have seen tragedies enough in
the course of our pilgrimage, and have learned to regard the doomed
weaklings--the wreckage of civilisation, the folk who are down--with
mingled compassion and dismay. I have found in such cases that the
miserable mortals