than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all.  At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning.  I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself.  To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax.  Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.  It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking.  It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it.  A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.  Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind.  The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things.  The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees.  Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice.  Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing.  Men might go through fire to find a cowslip.  Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird.  They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip.  Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals.  Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets.  But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets.  We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.  I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative.  But the matter for important comment was here:  that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales.  It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right.  The really curious thing was this:  that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines.  I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.  But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.