primary, difficult things
became impossible things. I had been greatly impeded and irritated in
London by the manoeuvres of a number of people who were anxious to make
capital out of the crisis, self-advertising people who wanted at any
cost to be lifted into a position of unique protest.... You see, that
unfortunate Nobel prize has turned the advocacy of peace into a highly
speculative profession; the qualification for the winner is so vaguely
defined that a vast multitude of voluntary idealists has been created
and a still greater number diverted from the unendowed pursuit of human
welfare in other directions. Such a man as myself who is known to
command a considerable publicity is necessarily a prey to those moral
_entrepreneurs_. All sorts of ridiculous and petty incidents had forced
this side of public effort upon me, but hitherto I had been able to say,
with a laugh or sigh as the case warranted, "So much is dear old
humanity and all of us"; and to remember the great residuum of nobility
that remained. Now that last saving consideration refused to be
credible. I lay with my body and my mind in pain thinking these people
over, thinking myself over too with the rest of my associates, thinking
drearily and weakly, recalling spites, dishonesties and vanities, feuds
and absurdities, until I was near persuaded that all my dreams of wider
human understandings, of great ends beyond the immediate aims and
passions of common everyday lives, could be at best no more than the
refuge of shy and weak and ineffective people from the failure of their
personal lives....

We idealists are not jolly people, not honest simple people; the strain
tells upon us; even to ourselves we are unappetizing. Aren't the burly,
bellowing fellows after all righter, with their simple natural hostility
to everything foreign, their valiant hatred of everything unlike
themselves, their contempt for aspiring weakness, their beer and lush
sentiment, their here-to-day-and-gone-tomorrow conviviality and
fellowship? Good fellows! While we others, lost in filmy speculations,
in moon-and-star snaring and the chase of dreams, stumble where even
they walk upright....

You know I have never quite believed in myself, never quite believed in
my work or my religion. So it has always been with me and always, I
suppose, will be. I know I am purblind, I know I do not see my way
clearly nor very far; I have to do with things imperfectly apprehended.
I cannot cheat