even in England, where the power to be idle is admired and envied, a man who lives as heroic a life as can be attained by playing golf and shooting pheasants is more trusted and respected than a rich man who paints or composes music for his amusement.  Field sports are intelligible enough; the pursuit of art requires some explanation, and incurs a suspicion of effeminacy or eccentricity.  Only when authorship becomes a source of profit is it thoroughly respectable.

I had a friend who died not very long ago.  He had in his younger days done a little administrative work; but he was wealthy, and at a comparatively early age he abandoned himself to leisure.  He travelled, he read, he went much into society, he enjoyed the company of his friends.  When he died he was spoken of as an amateur, and praised as a cricketer of some merit.  Even his closest friends seemed to find it necessary to explain and make excuses; he was shy, he stammered, he was not suited to parliamentary life; but I can think of few people who did so much for his friends or who so radiated the simplest sort of happiness.  To be welcomed by him, to be with him, put a little glow on life, because you felt instinctively that he was actively enjoying every hour of your company.  I thought, I remember, at his death, how hopeless it was to assess a man’s virtue and usefulness in the terms of his career.  If he had entered Parliament, registered a silent vote, spent his time in social functions, letter-writing, lobby-gossip, he would have been acclaimed as a man of weight and influence; but as it was, though he had stood by friends in trouble, had helped lame dogs over stiles, had been the centre of good-will and mutual understanding to a dozen groups and circles, it seemed impossible to recognise that he had done anything in his generation.  It is not to be claimed that his was a life of persistent benevolence or devoted energy; but I thought of a dozen men who had lived selfishly and comfortably, making money and amassing fortunes, without a touch of real kindness or fine tenderness about them, who would yet be held to have done well and to have deserved respect, when compared with this peace-maker!

And then I perceived how intolerably false many of our cherished ideals are; that apart from lives of pure selfishness and annexation, many a professed philanthropist or active statesman is merely following a sterile sort of ambition; that it is rare on the whole for so-called public men to live for the sake of the public; while the simple, kindly, uncalculating, friendly attitude to life is a real source of grace and beauty, and leaves behind it a fragrant memory enshrined in a hundred hearts.

So, too, when it comes to what we call literature.  No one supposes that we can do without it, and in its essence it is but an extension of happy, fine, vivid talk.  It is but the delighted perception of life, the ecstasy of taking a hand in the great mystery, the joy of love and companionship, the worship of beauty and desire and energy and memory taking shape in the most effective form that man can devise.  There is no real merit in the accumulation of property; only the people who do the necessary work of the world, and the people who increase the joy of the world are worth a moment’s thought, and yet both alike are little regarded.