As to the respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam
clubs and vibrates to Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come
down and redeem us from virtue," he is to be found in every
suburb.
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that
life at a public school is altogether good for a boy any more than
barrack life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home
life altogether good. Such good as it does, I should say, is due
to its freedom from the very atmosphere it professes to supply.
That atmosphere is usually described as an atmosphere of love; and
this definition should be sufficient to put any sane person on
guard against it. The people who talk and write as if the highest
attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously
from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five minutes
serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition. They cannot
have even made up their minds as to what they mean by love; for
when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes talking
about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense
they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or
animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very
small fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to
recreations wholly unconnected with love.
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