ey are toys for
children, and that we have long since ceased to regard them seriously
as a possible aid to conduct. But we are such deceivers, such
miserable, moral cowards, in such terror of appearing naive, that I
for one am not to be taken in by that smile and that pretence. The
individual who scoffs at New Year's Resolutions resembles the woman
who says she doesn't look under the bed at nights; the truth is not in
him, and in the very moment of his lying, could his cranium suddenly
become transparent, we should see Resolutions burning brightly in his
brain like lamps in Trafalgar Square. Of this I am convinced, that
nineteen-twentieths of us got out of bed that morning animated by that
special feeling of gay and strenuous vivacity which Resolutions alone
can produce. And nineteen-twentieths of us were also conscious of a
high virtue, forgetting that it is not the making of Resolutions, but
the keeping of them, which renders pardonable the consciousness of
virtue.

And at this hour, while the activity of the Resolution is yet in full
blast, I would wish to insist on the truism, obvious perhaps, but apt
to be overlooked, that a man cannot go forward and stand still at the
same time. Just as moralists have often animadverted upon the tendency
to live in the future, so I would animadvert upon the tendency to live
in the past. Because all around me I see men carefully tying
themselves with an unbreakable rope to an immovable post at the bottom
of a hill and then struggling to climb the hill. If there is one
Resolution more important than another it is the Resolution to break
with the past. If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it
is nothing. This may seem a hard and callous doctrine, but you know
there are aspects of common sense which decidedly are hard and
callous. And one finds constantly in plain common-sense persons (O
rare and select band!) a surprising quality of ruthlessness mingled
with softer traits. Have you not noticed it? The past is absolutely
intractable. One can't do anything with it. And an exaggerated
attention to it is like an exaggerated attention to sepulchres--a sign
of barbarism. Moreover, the past is usually the enemy of cheerfulness,
and cheerfulness is a most precious attainment.

Personally, I could even go so far as to exhibit hostility towards
grief, and a marked hostility towards remorse--two states of mind
which feed on the past instead of on the present. Remorse, which is