, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult
though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the
mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the
barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really
impossible.

I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years
ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd.
We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and
full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was
evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist
age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How
high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only
know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low
human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only
know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a
duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity
never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is
strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men
to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that
when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life
itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard
and whose spear was never broken.

THE END

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