The disciples of Smiles have disappeared; men get rich in other ways now; nevertheless a whole view of life has been left behind which we have not fundamentally questioned. The Victorians established the basis of morals in utility; we have come to the stage when we imagine that the basis of life itself is utility. For recreation as an end in itself we have so little appreciation that even sport has become a kind of duty, and nothing is more devastating than the scorn of a conscientious athlete for those who, enjoying perfectly good health, do not go to the trouble of keeping themselves fit. A little unpremeditated pleasure still persists in our common lives, in fox-trotting, drinking, and revues, but it is without either taste or resource; it is not expression but simply relaxation, an amusing way of being tired. The one thing that people will not pardon is the taking of pleasure seriously as an end in itself. The æsthete, at the Renaissance a type of the opulence of life, and quite a common, indeed an expected type, is in our day an aberration demanding our satire when once we have overcome our indignation. Nothing shows more disastrously how incapable we are of entertaining the conviction that life in itself, apart from the labor necessary to make it possible, is a thing worth living. Even art has justified itself for several decades chiefly by its social utility, and only now, against strong opposition, is it escaping from the barriers set up by the generation overawed by Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells. The notion that men may be on the earth for something else than sweating is dead. We have arrived at an amazing incapacity for joy; and life is to us always less worth living than it should be. This exaltation of means has brought about a general instrumentalization of life. It weighs heavily upon men; but upon women its weight is crushing, for women have not such a ready capacity as men for transforming themselves to the image of their functions, and they disfigure themselves more in the attempt. Consequently, as woman has taken a large and larger part in our tentative and unsatisfactory civilization she has undergone, in fact and in people’s minds, a distorting process. It is true, woman, lovely woman, the fair charmer, has passed away; but we are hardly better off now when she has become a term like economics. After the economic man has come the economic woman; that is, an entity almost as useful as machinery, and for the inner culture of mankind almost as uninteresting.