People have talked for two thousand years of the desirability of mens sana in corpore sano, but if everybody possessed this—­possessed it from birth and without effort—­there would probably soon be a shortage of genius.  The sanity of genius is not the sanity of the healthy minded athlete:  it is the sanity of the human spirit struggling against forces that threaten to frustrate it.  The greatest love-poetry has not been written by men who have found easy happiness in love.  Donne’s poems are the poems of a frustrated lover.  Keats’s greatest poetry was the fruit of unfulfilled love.  Thus genius turns poverty into riches.  Few men of genius are enviable save in their genius.  Beethoven, a frustrate lover and ultimately a deaf musician, is a type of genius at its most sublime.

Charles Lamb, as we read the Essays, seems at times to be one of the most enviable of men, but that is only because he is supremely lovable.  Who knows how much we owe to the defects of his life?  Even the impediment in his speech seems to have been one of the conditions of his genius.  He tells us that, if he had not stammered, he would probably have been a clergyman, and, if he had been a clergyman, he would hardly have been Elia.  His life, too, was that of a tragic bachelor—­he whose writings breathe the finest spirit of fireside comedy.  There could be no better example of the truth that genius is, as a rule, a response to apparently hostile limitations.

On the whole, then, the common-sense attitude to life is, not to deplore one’s limitations, but to make the best of them.  No man need envy another his good fortune too bitterly.  Good fortune has wasted as many men as it has assisted.  George Wyndham was one of the most fortunate men of his time—­strong, handsome, an athlete, an orator, a statesman, a writer with a sense of style, popular, rich, and with nine out of ten of the attributes that we envy most.  Had achievement come less easily to him, he might have been a greater man.  There have been ugly men who have been more enviable.  There have been weedy men who were more enviable.  There have been poor men who were more enviable.  But the truth is, one does not know whom to envy.  It is probably wise to envy nobody.

It would be foolish, however, to pretend that frustration is a desirable thing in itself, apart from all other considerations.  The beans nod their heads to no such gospel.  Frustration may easily reach the point of destruction.  One might frustrate one’s broad beans excessively by pulling them up by the roots or cutting them down to within an inch of the ground.  There must still be room left for the life of the plant to find a new outlet.  The beans do not preach a sermon against liberty, but only against lawlessness.  But, for all I know, they may preach different gospels to different amateur gardeners.  Each of us finds in nature what he wishes to find.  I confess I myself am prejudiced in favour of sermons of a consoling kind.  It is consoling to think that, in a world of defects, a defect often carries with it its own compensation—­that strength, as the preachers say, may be made perfect in weakness.  But, when one looks round and enumerates the miseries of human beings, one wonders how far this is, after all, true except for men whose gifts are naturally greater than hog, dog or devil can imperil.