recovery at all.

The dark shadow of professional anxiety is that it has no tragic
quality; it is like ploughing on day by day through endless mud-flats.
One does not feel, in the presence of sharp suffering or bitter loss,
that they ought not to exist. They are there, stern, implacable,
august; stately enemies, great combatants. There is a significance
about their very awfulness. One may fall before them, but they pass
like a great express train, roaring, flashing, things deliberately and
intently designed; but these dull failures which seem not the outgrowth
of anyone's fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone's
laziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them? It is
the helpless death of the quagmire, not the death of the fight or the
mountain-top. Is there, we ask ourselves, anything in the mind of God
which corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so
stagnant a stream can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! One
would rather have tyranny or savagery than anything so gross and smug.

And yet we see high-spirited and ardent husbands drawn into this by
obstinate and vulgar-minded wives. We see fine-natured and sensitive
women engulfed in it by selfish and ambitious husbands. The tendency is
awfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not by open combat, but by
secret and dull persistence. And one sees too--I have seen it many
times--children of delicate and eager natures, who would have
flourished and expanded in more generous air, become conventional and
commonplace and petty, concerned about knowing the right people and
doing the right things, and making the same stupid and paltry show,
which deceives no one.

There is nothing for it but independence and simplicity and, perhaps
best of all, a love of beauty. William Morris asserted passionately
enough that art was the only cure for all this dreariness--the love of
beautiful sounds and sights and words; and I think that is true, if it
be further extended to a perception of the quality of beauty in the
conduct and relations of life. For those are the cheap and reasonable
pleasures of life, accessible to all; and if men and women cared for
work first and the decent simplicities of wholesome living, and could
further find their pleasure in art, in whatever form, then I believe
that many of these fears and anxieties, so maiming and impairing to all
that is fine in life, would vanish quietly out of being. The thing
seems b