That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
Of all the world.
And yet no other way out. Disease and imbecility and an early and ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of an easily escapable dulness that may be anything from an ache up to an agony.
II
That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art, which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of reach now. That is the somewhat sick spirit's condition. The limp apathy that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening of sexual self-control—all these are symptomatic like the furred tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye.
Like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of Hamlet's complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of pampered youth before it has found any man's work to try itself on—
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable