The dark shadow of professional anxiety is that it has no tragic quality; it is like ploughing on day by day through endless mud-flats.  One does not feel, in the presence of sharp suffering or bitter loss, that they ought not to exist.  They are there, stern, implacable, august; stately enemies, great combatants.  There is a significance about their very awfulness.  One may fall before them, but they pass like a great express train, roaring, flashing, things deliberately and intently designed; but these dull failures which seem not the outgrowth of anyone’s fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone’s laziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them?  It is the helpless death of the quagmire, not the death of the fight or the mountain-top.  Is there, we ask ourselves, anything in the mind of God which corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so stagnant a stream can overflow the world?  The bourgeois ideal!  One would rather have tyranny or savagery than anything so gross and smug.

And yet we see high-spirited and ardent husbands drawn into this by obstinate and vulgar-minded wives.  We see fine-natured and sensitive women engulfed in it by selfish and ambitious husbands.  The tendency is awfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not by open combat, but by secret and dull persistence.  And one sees too—­ I have seen it many times—­children of delicate and eager natures, who would have flourished and expanded in more generous air, become conventional and commonplace and petty, concerned about knowing the right people and doing the right things, and making the same stupid and paltry show, which deceives no one.

There is nothing for it but independence and simplicity and, perhaps best of all, a love of beauty.  William Morris asserted passionately enough that art was the only cure for all this dreariness—­the love of beautiful sounds and sights and words; and I think that is true, if it be further extended to a perception of the quality of beauty in the conduct and relations of life.  For those are the cheap and reasonable pleasures of life, accessible to all; and if men and women cared for work first and the decent simplicities of wholesome living, and could further find their pleasure in art, in whatever form, then I believe that many of these fears and anxieties, so maiming and impairing to all that is fine in life, would vanish quietly out of being.  The thing seems both beautiful and possible, because one knows of households where it is so, and where it grows up naturally and easily enough.  I know households of both kinds—­where on the one hand the standard is ambitious and mean, where the inmates calculate everything with a view to success, or rather to producing an impression of success; and there all talk and intercourse is an unreal thing, not the outflow of natural interests and pleasant tastes, but a sham culture and a refinement that is only pursued because it is the right sort of surface to present to the world.  One submits to it with boredom, one leaves it with relief.  They have got the right people together, they have shown that they can command their attendance; it is all ceremony and waste.