It will be imagined that a man of this order would view my retreat from London with disfavour.  He thought me guilty of a kind of social perfidy.  No doubt the Earnest Good People, for whom I have the greatest reverence, will agree in the same verdict.  A letter received during the last few days from my friend puts the case with such force, and yet with such good-feeling, that I will transcribe a part of it.

‘I confess,’ he writes, ’that the pleasures of life among the mountains leaves me cold.  It is not that I am incapable of the same kind of pleasure, but, as you know, I have other ideas concerning the uses of life.  I cannot enjoy sunsets while men and women are starving.  The thought of all the misery of life for multitudes would, as Rossetti puts it, “make a goblin of the sun.”  You used to be very eloquent against good men who lived only for their own pleasure; are not you yourself living in the same way?  I have heard you declaim against the gross selfishness of Goethe’s aim in life—­“to build the pyramid of his own intellectual culture”; are not you, in your own way, pursuing the same ideal?  I have heard you say that nothing so belittled Goethe in your judgment as the fact that he was destitute of patriotism; he dwelt at ease among his books, while his country perished and felt no pang; and you live your joyous life among the hills, and have forgotten the Golgothas on which the poor of London endure their unpitied martyrdom.  You are doing good to yourself, no doubt; but is it not a better thing to be doing good to others?  I marvel that you can sleep at peace amid the wailing of the world.  I cannot, and I thank God I cannot.

’What you do not seem to realise is that all our acts must be judged not only from the personal, but from the collective standpoint.  Suppose all men followed your example, what would happen?  Why, cities would soon become the mere refuse-heaps of the unfit.  The drudges would remain, the captains of industry would be gone.  There would be no leaven of higher intelligence left, no standard of manners, nothing that could set the rhythm of life.  This is too much the case already.  The merchant, the writer, the man of wealth and culture, live as far as they can from the struggling crowd.  You would extend the process, and make it possible for the clerk as well as the merchant.  If your new gospel of a return to Nature succeeds, we shall soon see the universal exodus of the best intellectual and physical units of the community.  But you forget that some millions will remain behind, who cannot flee.  Have you no obligations to these?