kes pursuers let people alone, as
Alcibiades said. And when the final catastrophe draws near, he defends
himself under a capital charge with infinite good-humour; he has cared
nothing for slander and misrepresentation all his life, and why should
he begin now? In the last inspired scene, he is the only man of the
group who keeps his courteous tranquillity to the end; he had been
sent into the world, he had lived his life, why should he fear to
be dismissed? It matters little, in the presence of this august
imagination, if the real Socrates was a rude and prosy person, who came
by his death simply because the lively Athenians could tolerate anything
but a bore!

The Socratic attitude is better than the high-bred attitude; it is
better than the stoical attitude; it is even better than the pious
attitude, because it depends upon living life to the uttermost, rather
than upon detaching oneself from what one considers rather a poor
business. The attitude of Socrates is based upon courage, generosity,
simplicity. He knows that it is with fear that we weight our melancholy
sensibilities, that it is with meanness and coldness that we poison
life, that it is with complicated conventional duties that we fetter our
weakness. Socrates has no personal ambitions, and thus he is rid of all
envy and uncharitableness; he sees the world as it is, a very bright and
brave place, teeming with interesting ideas and undetermined problems.
Where Christianity has advanced upon this--for it has advanced
splendidly and securely--is in interpreting life less intellectually.
The intellectual side of life is what Socrates adores; the Christian
faith is applicable to a far wider circle of homely lives. Yet
Christianity too, in spite of ecclesiasticism, teems with ideas. Its
essence is an unprejudiced freedom of soul. Its problems are problems
of character which the simplest child can appreciate. But Christianity,
too, is built upon a basis of joy. "Freely ye have received, freely
give," is its essential maxim.

The secret then is to enjoy; but the enjoyment must not be that of the
spoiler who carries away all that he can, and buries it in his tent; but
the joy of relationship, the joy of conspiring together to be happy, the
joy of consoling and sympathising and sharing, because we have received
so much. Of course there remain the limitations of temperament, the
difficulty of preventing our own acrid humours from overflowing into
other lives; but th