and that means our punishment and
our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase,
that which closes the career of _Sardonyx_. It has become as
universal as the Lord's Prayer!
To think that so simple and obvious a solution should have lain
hidden all these aeons, to turn up at last as though by chance in a
little illustrated story-book! What a nugget!
Ou avions-nous donc la tete et les yeux?
Physical pain and the origin of evil seem the only questions with
which he has not been able to grapple. And yet if those difficulties
are ever dealt with and mastered and overcome for us it can only be
by some follower of Barty's methods.
It is true, no doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal
way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not
express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted
result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to
reconcile with their conscience.
Then, by a dexterous manipulation of our sympathies that amounts to
absolute conjuring, he has given the death-blow to all cruelty that
serves for our amusement, and killed the pride and pomp and
circumstance of glorious sport, and made them ridiculous with his
lusty laugh; even the bull-fights in Spain are coming to an end, and
all through a Spanish translation of _Life-blood_. All the
cruelties of the world are bound to follow in time, and this not so
much because they are cruel as because they are ridiculous and mean
and ugly, and would make us laugh if they didn't make us cry.
And to whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on an
average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty
years ago, men and women alike; that strength and beauty are rapidly
becoming the rule among us, and weakness and ugliness the exception?
He has been hard on these; he has been cruel to be kind, and they
have received notice to quit, and been generously compensated in
advance, I think! Who in these days would dare to enter the holy
state of wedlock unless they were pronounced physically, morally,
and mentally fit--to procreate their kind--not only by their own
conscience, but by the common consent of all who know them? And that
beauty, health, and strength are a part of that fitness, and old age
a bar to it, who would dare deny?
I'm no Adonis myself. I've got a long upper lip and an Irish kink in
my nose, inherited perhaps from some maternally ancestral Blake
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