and is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life.  She never ages, for she is the very expression of order, and order is eternal.  Only the wise man tastes all the savour of life and of every age, because only he can recognise their beauty, dignity and worth.  To see all things in God, to make of one’s own life a voyage to the ideal, to live with gratitude, recollection, kindness and courage—­this was the admirable spirit of Marcus Aurelius.  Add to these a kneeling humility and a devoted charity, and you have the wisdom of God’s children, the undying joy of true Christians.

The Fascination of Love

Woman would be loved without reason, without analysis; not because she is beautiful, or good, or cultivated, or gracious, or spiritual, but because she exists.  Every analysis seems to her an attenuation and a subordination of her personality to something which dominates and measures it.  She rejects it therefore, and rightly rejects it.  For as soon as one can say “because,” one is no longer under the spell; one appreciates or weighs, and at least in principle one is free.  If the empire of woman is to continue, love must remain a fascination, an enchantment; once her mystery is gone, her power is gone also.  So love must appear indivisible, irreducible, superior to all analysis, if it is to retain those aspects of infinitude, of the supernatural and the miraculous, which constitute its beauty.  Most people hold cheaply whatever they understand, and bow down only before the inexplicable.  Woman’s triumph is to demonstrate the obscurity of that male intelligence which thinks itself so enlightened; and when women inspire love, they are not without the proud joy of this triumph.  Their vanity is not altogether baseless; but a profound love is a light and a calm, a religion and a revelation, which in its turn despises these lesser triumphs of vanity.  Great souls wish nothing but the great, and all artifices seem shamefully puerile to one immersed in the infinite.

Man’s Useless Yearning

Eternal effort is the note of modern morality.  This painful restless “becoming” has taken the place of harmony, equilibrium, joy, that is to say, of “being.”  We are all fauns and satyrs aspiring to become angels, ugly creatures labouring at our embellishment, monstrous chrysalids trying to become butterflies.  Our ideal is no longer the tranquil beauty of the soul, it is the anguish of Laocoon fighting with the hydra of evil.  No longer are there happy and accomplished men; we are candidates, indeed, for heaven, but on earth galley-slaves, and we row away our life in the expectation of harbour.  It seems possible that this perfecting of which we are so proud is nothing else but a pretentious imperfection.