piece of amusing cynicism, it was in reality a plea entirely just. The
common fault of the Good Earnest People, as of most people, is that
they can only conceive of doing good after a pattern which is congenial
to themselves. But their mode of doing good, while it suits themselves
admirably, may not suit every constitution, and people of a quite
different mental constitution may be quite as good as themselves,
although it is after a very different pattern. Thoreau did a vast
amount of good by showing men, in his own example, that the simplest
kind of life was compatible with the highest intellectual aims; would
he, in the long-run, have served the world half as well had he forced
himself to live amid the squalor of a New York slum? Are not we so
much the wiser and stronger by the lessons taught in the hut beside
Walden Pond, that it would be the poorest compensation for their loss
to know that Thoreau by dint of effort made himself a fairly efficient
city missionary, or pleased the pundits of a Charity Organisation
Society? Or to take a yet more forcible example of my meaning: Hood
wrote _The Song of the Shirt_, and Wordsworth _The Ode on Intimations
of Immortality_; would either have gained by an exchange of lot? The
one poem could only have been written by a man who knew 'the tragic
heart of towns,' and the other by the man who knew the tranquil heart
of Nature; but Hood, transported to Grasmere, would have written
nothing, and Wordsworth in Fleet Street is unthinkable. As it was,
Destiny took the matter in hand, and having men to work upon whose
first principle of life was to fulfil and not to violate the instincts
of their own nature, succeeded in producing two poets who served
mankind each in a way not possible to the other.

I suspect there is a great deal of cant to be cleared out of the mind
before we can become equitable judges of what doing good really means.
I define doing good as the fulfilment of our best instincts and
faculties for the best use of mankind; but I do not expect that the
Good Earnest People will accept this definition. They would find it
much too catholic, simply because they have learned to attach a
specialised meaning to the phrase 'doing good,' which limits it to some
form of active philanthropy. If they would but allow a wider vision of
life to pass before the eye, they would see that there are many ways of
doing good besides those which satisfy their own ideals. It is a
singu