ter, into the brimming and dancing pool
of youth and life, the maxims of moralists and sages, the epigrams of
cynics, the sermons of priests, the good-humoured warnings of sensible
men, all crying out that nothing is really worth the winning, that
fame brings weariness and anxiety, that love is a fitful fever, that
wealth is a heavy burden, that ambition is a hectic dream; to all of
which ejaculations youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just
goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the
delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to test all
for itself. All this confession of disillusionment and disappointment
is true, but only partially true. The struggle, the effort, the
perseverance, does bring fine things with it--things finer by far than
the shining crown and the loud trumpets that attend it.

The explanation of it seems to be that men require to be tempted to
effort, by the dream of fame and wealth and leisure and imagined
satisfaction. It is the experience that we need, though we do not know
it; and experience, by itself, seems such a tedious, dowdy, tattered
thing, like a flag burnt by sun, bedraggled by rain, torn by the
onset, that it cannot by itself prove attractive. Men are heavily
preoccupied with ends and aims, and the recognised values of the
objects of desire and hope are often false and distorted values. So
singularly constituted are we, that the hope of idleness is alluring,
and some people are early deceived into habits of idleness, because
they cannot know what it is that lies on the further side of work. Of
course the bodily life has to be supplied, but when a man has all that
he needs--let us say food and drink, a quiet shelter, a garden and a
row of trees, a grassy meadow with a flowing stream, a congenial task,
a household of his own--it seems not enough! Let us suppose all that
granted to a man: he must consider next what kind of life he has
gained; he has the cup in his hands; with what liquor is it to be
filled? That is the point at which the imagination of man seems to
fail; he cannot set himself to vigorous, wholesome life for its own
sake. He has to be ever looking past it and beyond it for something to
yield him an added joy.

Now, what we all have to do, if we can, is to regard life steadily and
generously, to see that life, experience, emotion, are the real gifts;
not things to be hurried through, thrust aside, disregarded, as a man
makes