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us now. But the devil, speaking by the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, hath
it that in the case of one Tomlinson, the thing, so far as the soul is
concerned, has already been accomplished. Time was when men had
simple souls, desires as natural as their eyes, a little reasonable
philanthropy, a little reasonable philoprogenitiveness, hunger, and a
taste for good living, a decent, personal vanity, a healthy, satisfying
pugnacity, and so forth. But now we are taught and disciplined for
years and years, and thereafter we read and read for all the time some
strenuous, nerve-destroying business permits. Pedagogic hypnotists,
pulpit and platform hypnotists, book-writing hypnotists,
newspaper-writing hypnotists, are at us all. This sugar you are eating,
they tell us, is ink, and forthwith we reject it with infinite disgust.
This black draught of unrequited toil is True Happiness, and down it
goes with every symptom of pleasure. This Ibsen, they say, is dull
past believing, and we yawn and stretch beyond endurance. Pardon! they
interrupt, but this Ibsen is deep and delightful, and we vie with one
another in an excess of entertainment. And when we open the heads of
these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the
surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul,
a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway's feast of fine,
confused thinking. The girl is resolute to Live Her Own Life, a phrase
you may have heard before, and the man has a pretty perverted ambition
to be a cynical artistic person of the very calmest description. He is
hoping for the awakening of Passion in her, among other things. He knows
Passion ought to awaken, from the text-books he has studied. He knows
she admires his genius, but he is unaware that she does not admire his
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