men--the artist and the
educationalist--are sworn, on soul and conscience, not to ask it. You
get an ordinary, grinning, red-headed boy, and you have to educate him.
Faith supports you; you give your valuable hours, the boy does not seem
to profit, but that way your duty lies, for which you are paid, and you
must persevere. Education has always seemed to me one of the few
possible and dignified ways of life. A sailor, a shepherd, a
schoolmaster--to a less degree, a soldier--and (I don't know why, upon
my soul, except as a sort of schoolmaster's unofficial assistant, and a
kind of acrobat in tights) an artist, almost exhaust the category.

If I had to begin again--I know not--_si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
pouvait_ ... I know not at all--I believe I should try to honour Sex
more religiously. The worst of our education is that Christianity does
not recognise and hallow Sex. It looks askance at it, over its shoulder,
oppressed as it is by reminiscences of hermits and Asiatic
self-tortures. It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they
cannot see and make venerable that which they ought to see first and
hallow most. Well, it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation.

But no doubt there is something great in the half-success that has
attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct,
without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and
constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but
dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the
cast-iron "gentleman" and duty formula, with as little fervour and
poetry as possible; stoical and short.... There is a new something or
other in the wind, which exercises me hugely: anarchy,--I mean,
anarchism. People who (for pity's sake) commit dastardly murders very
basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters behind 'em (did you
see Vaillant to his daughter? it was the New Testament over again);
people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and yet their spiritual life
higher than that of most. This is just what the early Christians must
have seemed to the Romans. Is this, then, a new _drive_[83] among the
monkeys? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being martyred a few years more,
the gross, dull, not unkindly bourgeois may get tired or ashamed or
afraid of going on martyring; and the anarchists come out at the top
just like the early Christians. That is, of course, they will step into
power