“But,” I said, “in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties.  What is one to make of that?”

“It is a difficult matter,” he replied; “one does indeed, in the lives of great moralists, see sometimes that their work is vitiated by perverse and fantastic preferences, which they exalt out of all proportion to their real value.  But for all that, it is better to be on the side of the saints; for they are gifted with the sort of instinctive appreciation of the beauty of high morality of which I spoke.  Unselfishness, purity, peacefulness seem to them so beautiful and desirable that they are constrained to practise them.  While controversy, bitterness, cruelty, meanness, vice, seem so utterly ugly and repulsive that they cannot for an instant entertain even so much as a thought of them.”

“But if a man sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception,” I said, “what can he do?  How is he to learn to love what he does not admire and to abhor what he does not hate?  It all seems so fatalistic, so irresistible.”

“If he discerns his lack,” said my teacher with a smile, “he is probably not so very far from the truth.  The germ of the sense of moral beauty is there, and it only wants patience and endeavour to make it grow.  But it cannot be all done in any single life, of course; that is where the human faith fails, in its limitations of a man’s possibilities to a single life.”

“But what is the reason,” I said, “why the morality, the high austerity of some persons, who are indubitably high-minded and pure-hearted, is so utterly discouraging and even repellent?”

“Ah,” he said, “there you touch on a great truth.  The reason of that is that these have but a sterile sort of connoisseur-ship in virtue.  Virtue cannot be attained in solitude, nor can it be made a matter of private enjoyment.  The point is, of course, that it is not enough for a man to be himself; he must also give himself; and if a man is moral because of the delicate pleasure it brings him—­and the artistic pleasure of asceticism is a very high one—­he is apt to find himself here in very strange and distasteful company.  In this, as in everything, the only safe motive is the motive of love.  The man who takes pleasure in using influence, or setting a lofty example, is just as arid a dilettante as the musician who plays, or the artist who paints, for the sake of the applause and the admiration he wins; he is only regarding others as so many instruments for registering his own level of complacency.  Every one, even the least complicated of mankind, must know the exquisite pleasure that comes from doing the simplest and humblest service to one whom he loves; how such love converts the most menial office into a luxurious joy; and the higher that a man goes, the more does he discern in