Sufficient food and exercise and sleep may be
postulated; but these are all to be in the background, and the real
occupations of life are to be work and interests and talk and ideas and
natural relations with others. One knows of houses where some trifling
omission of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will plunge the
hostess into a dumb and incommunicable despair. The slightest lapse of
the conventional order becomes a cloud that intercepts the sun. But the
right attitude to life, if we desire to set ourselves free from this
self-created torment, is a resolute avoidance of minute preoccupations,
a light-hearted journeying, with an amused tolerance for the incidents
of the way. A conventional order of life is useful only in so far as it
removes from the mind the necessity of detailed planning, and allows it
to flow punctually and mechanically in an ordered course. But if we
exalt that order into something sacred and solemn, then we become
pharisaical and meticulous, and the savour of life is lost.

One remembers the scene in David Copperfield which makes so fine a
parable of life; how the merry party who were making the best of an
ill-cooked meal, and grilling the chops over the lodging-house fire,
were utterly disconcerted and reduced to miserable dignity by the entry
of the ceremonious servant with his "Pray, permit me," and how his
decorous management of the cheerful affair cast a gloom upon the circle
which could not even be dispelled when he had finished his work and
left them to themselves.

XVIII

AFFECTION

One of the ways in which our fears have power to wound us most
grievously is through our affections, and here we are confronted with a
real and crucial difficulty. Are we to hold ourselves in, to check the
impulses of affection, to use self-restraint, not multiply intimacies,
not extend sympathies? One sees every now and then lives which have
entwined themselves with every tendril of passion and love and
companionship and service round some one personality, and have then
been bereaved, with the result that the whole life has been palsied and
struck into desolation by the loss. I am thinking now of two instances
which I have known; one was a wife, who was childless, and whose whole
nature, every motive and every faculty, became centred upon her
husband, a man most worthy of love. He died suddenly, and his wife lost
everything at one blow; not only her lover and comrade, but every
occupati