But the whole book, if I may
say it, is the prelude to the further scene, the silent entry of Fate,
the coming of the Master to survey the servant's work.
Those pleasant days have a savour of their own for this one
reason--that they were not spent in a mere drifting indolence or a
luxurious abandonment. They were deliberately planned, intently lived,
carefully employed; behind the pleasures lay a great tract of solid
work, very diligently pursued. That was to have been the backbone of
the whole; and it is for this that I have no sense of regret or
contrition about it. It was an experiment; and if in one sense it
failed, because it did not take account of energies and elements
unused, in another sense it succeeded, because one cannot learn things
in this world by hearsay, but only by burning one's fingers in what
seemed so comfortable a flame. It was done, too, on the right lines,
with the desire not to be dependent upon diversion and stir and
business, but to approach life simply and directly, practising for the
days of loneliness and decline; and this was the error, that it tried
to mould life too much, to select from its material, to reject its
dross and debris, to rifle rather than to earn the treasure, to limit
hopes, to dip the wings of inconvenient desires.
But it is difficult, without experiment, to realise the strain of
living life too much in one mood and in one key.
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