There must be fewer such homes now, but still an enormous number. God and Devil are not so potent, but the habit of posturing remains, has been handed down and carried over into human relations--(at least God and Devil did protect us from that!)--so that there is not one, not the most intimate and sacred, but is made subtly the occasion of self-indulgence, easy, complacent, and devastating; the epidemic disease consequent on the airless years from the Reform Bill to the South African War--(you will remember the histrionics before, during and after that tragedy of two nations). The old English home--theatrical and oleographic--has been destroyed by it, and I rejoice as I rejoice to hear that the Chinese women are abandoning the folly of stunting their feet. We used to stunt the soul, the affections, human passions. Unbind the China woman's feet and she suffers agonies, so that she cannot walk. Thus it has been with us; we have suffered mortal agonies; we have been saved from madness by the inherited theatrical habit, by which we have shuffled through the human relationships enforced by our natural necessities and the inconsiderate insistence upon being born of the next generation. We have shuffled through them, I say, and we have made them charming, but we have not yet--shall we ever?--made them beautiful. There has been no true song in our hearts, only songs without words _à la_ Mendelssohn, nor yet a full music in our blood. We have imitated these things, from bad models, drawn crude sketches of them. I, for instance, play-acted myself into marriage; when it came to getting out of it, play-acting was of no avail, though even for that emergency, as you know, the English game has its rules. . . . I could not conform to them, and in that I believe I shared in the general experience of the race. I was pitchforked out of the old theatricality into the new and found it ineffective. That must be happening every day, in thousands, perhaps in millions, of cases. . . . I feel hopeful, and yet unhappy, too, for my experience came to me too late. I have been able to discard; but, for the new life--_vita nuova_--I have not wherewith to grasp, to take into myself, to make my own. Even here on this island, in this country of light, I do not seem to myself to be fully alive, but am an outsider, a spectator, even as I was when a small boy, and I shall go down into this warm earth hardly riper than I was when I was born, nurtured only by one genuine experience and that negative. But for that I am thankful. It has made it possible for me to ruminate, if not to act, to rejoice in the possession of my uncomely and unwieldy body, to be content with that small fragment of my soul which I have mastered.