I felt that it was left to ourselves to choose, and that, hampered as we feel ourselves to be by innumerable chains of circumstance, we could yet indeed originate action and impede the underlying Will, I should relapse into despair before a problem full of sickening complexities and admitted failures.  Meanwhile, I do what I am given to do; I perceive what I am allowed to perceive; I suffer what is appointed for me to suffer; but all with a hope that I may yet see the dawn break upon the sunlit sea, beyond the dark hills of time.

X

THE DRAMATIC SENSE

The other day I was walking along a road at Cambridge, engulfed in a torrent of cloth-capped and coated young men all flowing one way—­ going to see or, as it is now called, to “watch” a match.  We met a little girl walking with her governess in the opposite direction.  There was a baleful light of intellect in the child’s eye, and a preponderance of forehead combined with a certain lankness of hair betrayed, I fancy, an ingenuous academical origin.  The girl was looking round her with an unholy sense of superiority, and as we passed she said to her governess in a clear-cut, complacent tone, “We’re quite exceptional, aren’t we?” To which the governess replied briskly, “Laura, don’t be ridiculous!” To which exhortation Laura replied with self-satisfied pertinacity, “No, but we are exceptional, aren’t we?”

Ah, Miss Laura, I thought to myself, you are one of those people with a dramatic sense of your own importance.  It will probably make you very happy, and an absolutely insufferable person!  I have little doubt that the tiny prig was saying to herself, “I dare say that all these men are wondering who is the clever-looking little girl who is walking in the opposite direction to the match, and has probably something better to do than look on at matches.”  It is a great question whether one ought to wish people to nourish illusions about themselves, or whether one ought to desire such illusions to be dispelled.  They certainly add immensely to people’s happiness, but on the other hand, if life is an educative progress, and if the aim of human beings is or ought to be the attainment of moral perfection, then the sooner that these illusions are dispelled the better.  It is one of the many questions which depend upon the great fact as to whether our identity is prolonged after death.  If identity is not prolonged, then one would wish people to maintain every illusion which makes life happier; and there is certainly no illusion which brings people such supreme and unfailing contentment as the sense of their own significance in the world.  This illusion rises superior to all failures and disappointments.  It makes the smallest and simplest act seem momentous.  The world for such persons is merely a theatre of gazers in which they discharge their part appropriately and successfully.  I know several people who have