“Thou know’st ’tis common!” Out of that grows up a rude dreariness, a philosophy which has nothing dignified about it, but is merely a recognition of the fact that life is a poor affair, and that one cannot hope to have things to one’s mind.  Or there is a dull frame of mind which implies a meek resignation, a sense of disappointment about life, borne with a mournful patience, a sense of one’s sphere having somehow fallen short of one’s deserts.  This produces the grumpy paterfamilias who drowses over a paper or grumbles over a pipe; such a man is inimitably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage.  That sort of ugly disillusionment, that publicity of disappointment, that frank disregard of all concerns except one’s own, is one of the most hideous features of middle-class life, and it is rather characteristically English.  It sometimes conceals a robust good sense and even kindliness; but it is a base thing at best, and seems to be the shadow of commercial prosperity.  Yet it at least implies a certain sturdiness of character, and a stubborn belief in one’s own merits which is quite impervious to the lessons of experience.  On sensitive and imaginative people the result of the professional struggle with life, the essence of which is often social pretentiousness, is different.  It ends in a mournful and distracted kind of fatigue, a tired sort of padding along after life, a timid bewilderment at conditions which one cannot alter, and which yet have no dignity or seemliness.

What is there that is wrong with all this?  The cause is easy enough to analyse.  It is the result of a system which develops conventional, short-sighted, complicated households, averse to effort, fond of pleasure, and with tastes which are expensive without being refined.  The only cure would seem to be that men and women should be born different, with simple active generous natures; it is easy to say that!  But the worst of the situation is that the sordid banality and ugly tragedy of their lot do not dawn on the people concerned.  Greedy vanity in the more robust, lack of moral courage and firmness in the more sensitive, with a social organisation that aims at a surface dignity and a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil’s cauldron.  The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all.  There is a nobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion.  There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a desperate failure.  But this abject, listless dreariness, which can hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down the muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery battling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless and unintelligible destiny, seems to have in it no seed of recovery at all.