acceptability to his readers. He denounces the quality for
which 'geniality' had become the accepted nickname. The geniality,
whether of Dickens or Kingsley, was often, he thought, disgusting and
offensive. It gives a false view of life. 'Enjoyment forms a small and
unimportant element in the life of most men.' Life, he thinks, is
'satisfactory' but 'enjoyment casual and transitory.' 'Geniality,'
therefore, should be only an occasional element; habitually indulged and
artificially introduced, it becomes as nauseous as sweetmeats mixed with
bread and cheese. To the more serious person, much of the popular
literature of the day suggests Solomon's words: 'I said of laughter, it
is mad; and of mirth what doeth it?' So the talk of progress seems to
him to express the ideal of a moral 'lubberland.' Six thousand years of
trial and suffering, according to these prophets, are to result in a
'perpetual succession of comfortable shopkeepers.' The supposition is
'so revolting to the moral sense that it would be difficult to reconcile
it with any belief at all in a Divine Providence.' You are beginning, he
declares after Carlyle's account of Robespierre, 'to be a bore with your
nineteenth century.' Our life, he says elsewhere ('Christian Optimism'),
is like 'standing on a narrow strip of shore, waiting till the tide
which has washed away hundreds of millions of our fellows shall wash us
away also into a country of which there are no charts and from which
there is no return. What little we have reason to believe about that
unseen world is that it exists, that it contains extremes of good and
evil, awful and mysterious beyond human conception, and that these
tremendous possibilities are connected with our conduct here. It is
surely wiser and more manly to walk silently by the shore of that silent
sea, than to boast with puerile exultation over the little sand castles
which we have employed our short leisure in building up. Life can never
be matter of exultation, nor can the progress of arts and sciences ever
fill the heart of a man who has a heart to be filled.' The value of all
human labours is that of schoolboys' lessons, 'worth nothing at all
except as a task and a discipline.' Life and death are greater and older
than steam engines and cotton mills. 'Why mankind was created at all,
why we continue to exist, what has become of all that vast multitude
which has passed, with more or less sin and misery, through this
mysterious earth, a