lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly
blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--

"Enough we live:--and if a life,
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth."

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch.
For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not
the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which
we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger
to neutralise each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a
fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe
at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage,
to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we
demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get
it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to
think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without
once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without
once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist
and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is
he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to
die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist
who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash
the whole universe for the sake of itself.

I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they
came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the
time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether
it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us
that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his
brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out
because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even
suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot
machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I
found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and
humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and
absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the
refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man,
kills a