claims are
viewed by many possessors on the other, is because there is a spirit
of sympathy growing up, which has not yet become self-sacrifice, but
is on its way to become so.

Then we must ask ourselves what our duty is. Not, I think, with all
our comforts about us, to chant loud odes about its being all right
with the world, but to see what we can do to make it all right, to
equalise, to share, to give.

The finest thing, of course, would be if those who are set in the
midst of comfort could come calmly out of it, and live simpler,
kinder, more direct lives; but apart from that, what can we do? Is it
our duty, in the face of all that, to surrender every species of
enjoyment and delight, to live meanly and anxiously because others
have to live so? I am not at all sure that it would not prove our
greatness if the thought of all the helpless pain and drudgery of the
world, the drift of falling tears, were so intolerable to us that we
simply could not endure the thought; but I think that would end in
quixotism and pessimism of the worst kind, if one would not eat or
drink, because men starve in Russia or India, if one would not sleep
because sufferers toss through the night in pain. That seems a morbid
and self-sought suffering.

No, I believe that we must share our joy as far as we can, and that it
is our duty rather to have joy to share, and to guard the quality of
it, make it pure and true. We do best if we can so refine our
happiness as to make it a thing which is not dependent upon wealth or
ease; and the more natural our life is, the more can we be of use by
the example which is not self-conscious but contagious, by showing
that joy does not depend upon excitement and stimulus, but upon vivid
using of the very stuff of life.

Where we fail, many of us, is in the elaborateness of our pleasures,
in the fact that we learn to be connoisseurs rather than viveurs, in
losing our taste for the ancient wholesome activities and delights.

I had caught an hour, that very day, to visit the Academy; it was a
doubtful pleasure, though if I could have had the great rooms to
myself it would have been a delightful thing enough; but to be crushed
and elbowed by such numbers of people who seemed intent not on looking
at anything, but on trying to see if they could recognise any of their
friends! It was a curious collection certainly! So many pictures of
old disgraceful men, whose faces seemed like the faces of toads or
magpie