d more varied than
their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to
encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a
chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with
the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on
the day that he was born.

This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is
romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is
everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is
arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have
groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian
atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that
you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an
adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing
that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been
often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident.
In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of
a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and
transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an
unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far
as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we
are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into
it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even
judge--in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly
adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not
falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk
suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something
of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in
wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle
is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt
from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born,
we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has
its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a
world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the
family we step into a fairy-tale.

This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family
and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest
thing in life; romance is deeper even than