he was speaking not only for himself, but for multitudes who have had the same feeling, but lacked all gift of expression.'
'That just points what I wanted to say. A feeling of that kind is, after all, fleeting; it takes up but a small part of a working day, and a working day is, on the whole, a hopeful one. Only the things that make it so would not produce a lyrical cry.'
'That sounds so reasonable; it is more provoking than a downright attack.'
'No; but really it is so. Think what it takes of endeavour, of effort, to make up one day of this world's life. Most of this may be called downright drudgery. Things that have to be done over and over again, in almost exactly the same way, simply because people need three meals a day. And yet the work done has its own interest to each healthy individual.'
'What, to the women who make buttonholes all their lives, and make dolls' arms for a shilling the hundred dozen; to the men who break stones for the road, and work in gangs in factories and mines underground?'
'Do not forget,' said Langdale with a smile, 'that you are thinking of these monotonous employments with a highly sensitized imagination. And even when the work is in far more imaginative grooves—when it brings the mind into touch with things that do not pass away with the using—how much more effective for poetry is the reaction, the mistrust, the vague disappointment, than the moderate satisfaction at moderate success—the feeling of expectation and looking on, and waiting for what is to follow, which, after all, give their zest to the average days of existence?'
'Well, are we to come back to the old idea of banishing poesy because it is misleading?'
'By no means. Only I think we do not enough realize its tendency to heighten what is sad in life—often, I think, to exaggerate it. It isn't the people who have most to do with life that write criticisms on it. And in all criticisms there is a heightening and a deepening. It is the craft of the ready writer.'
'You make me think of an expression people often use when anything dreadful happens—"It is like a dream." And yet the worst things always happen when we are wide awake. Still, I feel the force of what you say about the poor. I have often been struck with the uncomplaining, almost stoical, way in which they take misfortune.'
'Yes, one cannot help being struck with it. "It does feel rather bad," they will say, when "intolerable agony" would be our only adequate expression for what they are enduring. And how simply often they face death. "I wouldn't mind going, if it weren't for the children," I have heard poor, long-suffering women say over and over again. What a sinewy, insinuating expression for passing away from all that we know. There is no art of the rhetorician here—of the shoemaker who can make a great shoe for a little foot.'