of them. But why have
you fallen--you? What fatal, diabolical causes hindered your life
from blossoming into full flower? Why, almost before beginning life,
were you in such haste to cast off the image and likeness of God,
and to become a cowardly beast who backs and scares others because
he is afraid himself? You are afraid of life--as afraid of it as
an Oriental who sits all day on a cushion smoking his hookah. Yes,
you read a great deal, and a European coat fits you well, but yet
with what tender, purely Oriental, pasha-like care you protect
yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, from pain and uneasiness!
How early your soul has taken to its dressing-gown! What a cowardly
part you have played towards real life and nature, with which every
healthy and normal man struggles! How soft, how snug, how warm, how
comfortable--and how bored you are! Yes, it is deathly boredom,
unrelieved by one ray of light, as in solitary confinement; but you
try to hide from that enemy, too, you play cards eight hours out
of twenty-four.

"And your irony? Oh, but how well I understand it! Free, bold,
living thought is searching and dominating; for an indolent, sluggish
mind it is intolerable. That it may not disturb your peace, like
thousands of your contemporaries, you made haste in youth to put
it under bar and bolt. Your ironical attitude to life, or whatever
you like to call it, is your armour; and your thought, fettered and
frightened, dare not leap over the fence you have put round it; and
when you jeer at ideas which you pretend to know all about, you are
like the deserter fleeing from the field of battle, and, to stifle
his shame, sneering at war and at valour. Cynicism stifles pain.
In some novel of Dostoevsky's an old man tramples underfoot the
portrait of his dearly loved daughter because he had been unjust
to her, and you vent your foul and vulgar jeers upon the ideas of
goodness and truth because you have not the strength to follow them.
You are frightened of every honest and truthful hint at your
degradation, and you purposely surround yourself with people who
do nothing but flatter your weaknesses. And you may well, you may
well dread the sight of tears!

"By the way, your attitude to women. Shamelessness has been handed
down to us in our flesh and blood, and we are trained to shamelessness;
but that is what we are men for--to subdue the beast in us. When
you reached manhood and _all_ ideas became known to you, you c