e unless accompanied by a waste of life and of money;
in short, all this incapacity _for being manly without being
destructive_, is largely due among us Anglo-Saxons to the bringing up
of boys as mere playground dunces, for fear (as we are told by parents
and schoolmasters) that the future citizens of England should take to
evil communications and worse manners if they did not play and talk
cricket and football at every available moment. For what can you
expect but that manly innocence which has been preserved at the
expense of every higher taste should grow up into manly virtue unable
to maintain itself save by hunting and fishing, shooting and
horse-racing; expensive amusements requiring, in their turn, a further
sacrifice of all capacities for innocent, noble and inexpensive
interests, in the absorbing, sometimes stultifying, often debasing
processes of making money?

The same complacency towards waste and mischief for the sake of moral
advantages may be studied in the case also of our womankind. The
absorption in their _toilettes_ guards them from many dangers to
family sanctity. And from how much cruel gossip is not society saved
by the prevalent passion for bridge!

So at least moralists, who are usually the most complacently
demoralised of elderly cynics, are ready to assure us.

XV.

"We should learn to have noble desires," wrote Schiller, "in order to
have no need for sublime resolutions." And morality might almost take
care of itself, if people knew the strong and exquisite pleasures to
be found, like the aromatic ragwort growing on every wall and
stone-heap in the south, everywhere in the course of everyday life.
But alas! the openness to cheap and simple pleasures means the fine
training of fine faculties; and mankind asks for the expensive and
far-fetched and unwholesome pleasures, because it is itself of poor
and cheap material and of wholesale scamped manufacture.

XVI.

Biological facts, as well as our observation of our own self (which is
psychology), lead us to believe that, as I have mentioned before,
Pleasure fulfils the function not merely of leading us along livable
ways, but also of creating a surplus of vitality. Itself an almost
unnecessary boon (since Pain is sufficient to regulate our choice),
Pleasure would thus tend to ever fresh and, if I may use the word,
gratuitous supplies of good. Does not this give to Pleasure a certain
freedom, a humane character wholly different from the