this life and the reality of the spirit,--the way over whose entrance
stand written the words: "The more nearly a man approacheth unto God, the
further doth he recede from all earthly solace." And truly he who hath
boldly entered on this path shall be free in heart, neither shall shadows
trample him down--_tenebroe non conculcabunt te_. There is also that other
way pointed out by Pindar to the Greek world in his Hymns of Victory,--the
way of honour and glory, of seeking the sweet things of the day without
grasping after the impossible, of joys temperate withal yet gilded with
the golden light of song; the way of the strong will and clear judgment
and purged imagination, with reverence for the destiny that is hereafter
to be; of the man who is proudly sufficient unto himself yet modest before
the gods; the way summed up by a rival of Pindar's in the phrase: "Doing
righteousness, make glad your heart!" There is not much room for pity here
or in the _Imitation_, for compassion after all is a perilous guest, and
only too often drags down a man to the level of that which he pities.

And now instead of these twin paths of responsibility to God and to a
man's own self, we have sought out another way--the way of all-levelling
human sympathy, the way celebrated by Edwin Markham! Oh, if it were
possible to cry out on the street corners where all men might hear and
know that there is no salvation for literature and art, no hope for the
harvest of the higher life, no joy or meaning in our civilisation, until
we learn to distinguish between the manly sentiment of such work as
Millet's painting and the mawkishness of such a poem as _The Man with the
Hoe_! The one is the vigorous creation of a craftsman who builded his art
with noble restraint on the great achievements of the past, and who
respected himself and the material he worked in; the other is the
disturbing cry of one who is intellectually an hysterical parvenu.

LVIII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

The new volumes of Letters have carried me back to Carlyle, who has always
rather repelled me by his noisy voluminousness. But one message at least
he had to proclaim to the world,--the ancient imperishable truth that man
lives, not by surrender of himself to his kind, but by following the stern
call of duty to his own soul. Do thy work and be at peace. Make thyself
right and the world will take care of itself. There lies the everlasting
verity we are rapidly forgetting. And he sa