are blind and do not
see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women
who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in
their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid
about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head.
A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him
and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are
utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism.
Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother,
who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong
as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value.
The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely
be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is.
Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

This at least had come to be my position about all that
was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any
cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance.
A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested
in his views of it. "My son give me thy heart"; the heart must
be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a fixed heart we
have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism.
It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed
of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance.
But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective.
It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those
quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous
than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--

"Enough we live:--and if a life, With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain
of birth."

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes
our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution,
what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise,
but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.
We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a
surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.
We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle,
to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return
at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world