dominate I cannot say. And in the
second place, even of what Good there is--and I do not under-estimate
its worth--it is but an infinitesimal portion that I am capable of
realizing, so limited am I by temperament and circumstance, so
bound by the errors and illusions of the past, so hampered by the
disabilities crowding in from the future. For though, as I think, the
older I get the more clearly I recognize what is good, and the more I
learn to value and to perceive it, yet at the same time the less do I
become capable of making it my own, and must in the nature of things
become less and less so, in so far at least as Goods other than those
of the intellect are concerned. And this is a position which seems to
be involved in the mere fact of age and death frankly seen from
the naturalistic point of view; and so it has always been felt
and expressed from the time of the Greeks onwards, and not least
effectively, perhaps, by Browning in his 'Cleon'--you remember the
passage:

"'... Every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
While every day my hairs fall more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase--
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape,
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still in the phrase of such as thou,
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over-much,
Shall sleep in my urn.'

"You see the point; indeed, it is so familiar, I have laboured it,
perhaps, too much. But the result seems to be, that while it is
natural enough that in youth, for those who are capable of Good,
life should seem to be pre-eminently worth the having, yet the last
judgment of age, for those who believe that death is the end, will be
a doubt, and perhaps more than a doubt, even in the case of those
most favoured by fortune, whether after all a life has been worth the
trouble of living which has unfolded such infinite promise only to
bury it fruitless in the grave."

"I think that's rather a morbid view!" said Parry.

"I do not know," I said, "whether it is morbid, nor do I very much
care; the question is, whether it is reasonable, and whether it is not
the position naturally and perhaps inevitably adopted not by the
worst but by the best men amo