It seems rather pitiful that we should not be able to face the
truth, and that we cannot be content with discerning the principle
of it all, which is that our work is given to us to do not for its
intrinsic value, but because it is good for us to do it.
The secret government of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated
by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw
that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things
which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance,
as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet
by letting one hold the blotting-paper and another the ink, so that
they believe that they are helping when they are merely being kept
from hindering.
And this strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and
energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn
out hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may
drink deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon
us. The failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed
and planned by writers and artists, lies in the absence of all
power to suggest how the happy folk who have conquered all the ills
and difficulties of life are to employ themselves reasonably and
eagerly when there is nothing left to improve. William Morris,
indeed, in his News from Nowhere, confessed through the mouth of
one of his characters that there would be hardly enough pleasant
work, like hay-making and bridge-building and carpentering and
paving, left to go round; and the picture of life which he draws,
with its total lack of privacy, the shops where you may ask for
anything that you want without having to pay, the guest-houses,
with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews
served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing,
the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes
on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity,
because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human
interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is
refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass.
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