What I rather desire is to encourage a very different kind of individualism, the individualism of the man who realises that the hope of the race depends upon the quality of the life, upon the number of people who live quiet, active, gentle, kindly, faithful lives, enjoying their work and turning for recreation to the nobler and simpler sources of pleasure—­the love of nature, poetry, literature, and art.  Of course the difficulty is that we do not, most of us, find our pleasures in these latter things, but in the excitement and amusement of social life.  I mournfully admit it, and I quite see the uselessness of trying to bring pleasures within the reach of people when they have no taste for them; but an increasing number of people do care for such things, and there are still more who would care for them, if only they could be introduced to them at an impressionable age.

If it is said that this kind of simplicity is a very tame and spiritless thing, I would answer that it has the advantage of being within the reach of all.  The reason why the pursuit of social advancement and success is so hollow, is that the subordinate life is after all the life that must fall to the majority of people.  We cannot organise society on the lines of the army of a lesser German state, which consisted of twenty-four officers, covered with military decorations, and eight privates.  The successful men, whatever happens, must be a small minority; and what I desire is that success, as it is called, should fall quietly and inevitably on the heads of those who deserve it, while ordinary people should put it out of their thoughts.  It is no use holding up an ideal which cannot be attained, and which the mere attempt to attain is fruitful in disaster and discontent.

I do not at all wish to teach a gospel of dulness.  I am of the opinion of the poet who said: 

“Life is not life at all without delight,
Nor hath it any might.”

But I am quite sure that the real pleasures of the world are those which cannot be bought for money, and which are wholly independent of success.

Every one who has watched children knows the extraordinary amount of pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials.  To keep a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are pebbles and thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are paid for in daisies, will be an engrossing occupation to healthy children for a long summer afternoon.  There is no reason why that kind of zest should not be imported into later life; and, as a matter of fact, people who practise self-restraint, who are temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind of contentment in all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age; it is the jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus of excitement to carry them along from hour to hour.  Who does not remember the rigid asceticism of Ruskin’s childhood?  A bunch of keys to play with, and a little later a