ul
everything was; but I'm sure he had a sort of comfortable feeling of
being a part of it all, of being somehow all right. And he wasn't
worrying about his condition, as you all worry for him. I don't mean
you aren't right to worry, in a way; except that no one ought to worry.
But you oughtn't to suppose it's all a dreadful and intolerable thing,
just because you can imagine something better. That, of course, is
only one case; but I believe it's the same everywhere; yes, even in the
big cities, which, to my taste, look from outside much more repulsive
and terrible. There's a quality in the inevitable facts of life, in
making one's living, and marrying and producing children, in the ending
of one and the beginning of another day, in the uncertainties and fears
and hopes, in the tragedies as well as the comedies, something that
arrests and interests and absorbs, even if it doesn't delight. I'm not
saying people are happy; sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't.
But anyhow they are interested. And life itself is the interest. And
that interest is perennial, and of all ages and all classes. And if
you leave it out you leave out the only thing that counts. That's why
ideals are so empty; just because, I mean, they don't exist. And I
assure you--now I'm going to confess--that often, when I come away from
some meeting or from reading some dreadful article on social reform, I
feel as if I could embrace everything and everyone I come across,
simply for being so good as to exist--the 'bus-drivers, the cabmen, the
shop-keepers, the slum-landlords, the slum-victims, the prostitutes,
the thieves. There they are, anyhow, in their extraordinary setting,
floating on the great river of life, that was and is and will be,
itself its own justification, through whatever country it may flow.
And if you don't realize that--if you have a whole community that
doesn't realize it--then, however happy and comfortable and equitable
and all the rest of it you make your society, you haven't really done
much for them. Their last state may even be worse than the first,
because they will have lost the natural instinctive acceptance of life,
without learning how to accept it on the higher plane.

"And that is why--now comes what I really do care about, and what I've
been wanting to say--that is why there is nothing so important for the
future or the present of the world as poetry. Allison, for instance,
and Wilson would be different m