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Rh of thought is furnished by a consideration of what life and living mean in Puritan and commercial England, and still more in commercial and Puritan America. No one, of course, sees the ghastly aspects of the modern Anglo-Saxon civilisation, which is imposing itself on the world, more acutely than he does. That is the great value and use of him, and of those like him. But the ideal tendency which underlies it all is completely hidden from him. It seemed to him an end, a conclusion, a final state, a hell of pretence and ennui. To us it appears rather as a purgatory, the meaning and consolation of which we find in the vague glimmers of auroral paradise which flash down upon the spectacle of our weariness and woe.'

'And so,' said Randal, 'you utterly repudiate the hunt for happiness on the recognised lines of freedom and hope for the man of talent? You are landing yourself in a pretty quagmire of played-out asceticism and sociologic jargon.'

'Not as we conceive of it, either for the man of talent or for the average man without—either for what one may call utility in the block or for beauty in the block, either for Commerce or for Art,—or so at least it appears to me. Beyle's creed at the present moment has the all but undivided allegiance of the artists. We inscribe in letters of gold over the portal of Art, the command to eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow