The mists were rising from his soul. He stooped in his eagerness and peered at the years.
He began to see the Reality of things. He was filled with a strange excitement. He went back in fancy, and picked up the thread of the unravelling of life where it had dropped from his fingers in his eagerness to follow Schopenhauer’s inert nerveless guidance.
The scowling genius of the German had nearly found the truth—that a mighty desire for life was at the core of all existence. And here had slipped the mighty intellect; and the crabbed hands, groping in the half-darkness, missing the little, had missed the all, since that which stirs at the heart of all things is not a will to live, but life—life with an overwhelming urging to fulfil its fullest self. Nay, urging so overwhelming that, to know the fullest life, it lightly takes the risks of death in the achieving.
The bitter lips, not given to understatements, had yet understated the whole case. He of the surly shoulders had gone before the youth, beckoning him, until they were stepping along the hard stony ways of unhandsome half-truths that wounded the feet, and straying in the dirty alleys where the refuse is shot, their attention fixed on the cruelties, seeing only the shabby side of life. And, for solace, the worthy German could point but to two ways out of the shabbiness of his destiny—art and asceticism.
But this was not life at all.
The youth awaked to find the highway of life to be clean and healthy and glorious and beautiful. He stepped back upon it. Up aloft and afar and hard by, the world sang with the joy of life; and the motherhood of the world held out immaculate arms to him. He stood at gaze with life, and he saw that it was not misery; nay, so far from being compact of misery, life lay before him unutterably sweet, thrillingly magnificent; so pleasant that we do not notice the delight of sheer living until misery knocks at our doors to say the order of our career is broken.
Life is to be lived, not baulked—otherwise we give the godhood within us the lie.
There is no virtue in a doleful countenance, nor aught more sacred in solemnity than in delight.
For Joy is serious as sorrow; comedy serious as Tragedy; life serious as Death.
It came to the youth, standing there in the reek of the night, that he was on the brink of manhood; he faced the prospect; and the whisper of the Masterfolk came to him where he stood.