asis. But we saw in our lectures on melancholy how
precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover it is but for the
individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and
unprovided for in his philosophy.

No such attempt can be a GENERAL solution of the problem; and to minds
of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such
optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a
real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to
escape by. It leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch
of Satan. The real deliverance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of
universal application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and
overcome in higher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially
unbroken. If one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic
death in this world's history fairly into his mind--freezing, drowning
entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases--he can
with difficulty, it seems to me, continue his own career of worldly
prosperity without suspecting that he may all the while not be really
inside the game, that he may lack the great initiation.

Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes
the initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but
something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste
will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such
rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and simple, with its
sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a
serious solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never
be an answer to the sphinx's riddle.

In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for
reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be
essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme
mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for
it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's
frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still
more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact
consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if
yet we cling to life, and he is able "to fling it away like a flower"
as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born
superior. Each of us in his own person fe