XX. MAKETH EXIT 359 I. OPENETH DISCOURSE. Well, old musty, dusty, time-trodden arena of Literature and Society, what now? Are your doors wide open, and may a stranger enter? A perpetual dance is going on, so your outside advertisements proclaim; and truly a dance is good so long as it is suggestive of wholesome mirth. But is yours a dance of Death or of Life? A fandango of mockery, a rigadoon of sham, or a waltzing-game at "beggar my neighbour"? Moreover, is the fun worth paying for? Let me look in and judge. Nay, by the gods of Homer, what a dire confusion of sight and sense and sound is all this "mortal coil" and whirligig of humanity! What noise and laughter, interspersed with sundry groanings, as of fiends in Hell! Listening, I catch the echoes of many voices I know; now and again I have glimpses of faces that in their beauty or ugliness, their smiling or sneering, are perfectly familiar to me. Friends? No, not precisely. No man who has lived long enough to be wise in social wisdom can be certain that he has a friend anywhere; besides, I do not pretend to have found what Socrates himself could not discover. Enemies then? Truly that is probable! Enemies are more than luxuries: they are necessities; one cannot live strongly or self-reliantly without them. One does not forgive them (such pure Christianity has never yet been in vogue); one fights them, and fighting is excellent exercise. So, have at you all, good braggarts of work done and undone! I am as ready to give and take the "passado" as any Mercutio on a hot Italian day. Note or disregard me, I care naught; it is solely for my own diversion, not for yours, that I come amongst you. I want my amusement as others want theirs, and nothing amuses me quite so much as the strange customs and behaviour of the men and women of my time. I love them--in a way; but I cannot, help laughing at them--occasionally. Sentiment would be wasted on them; one does not "grieve" over folly and vice any more, unless one is an ill-paid (and therefore ill-used) cleric, because folly and vice assume such pettifogging and ludicrous aspects that one's risible faculties are at once excited, and pity dries up at its fountain-head. For we live in a little age, and nothing great can breathe in the stifling atmosphere of our languid, listless indifference to God and man.