I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch.  For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.  We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.  We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world:  but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on.  Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?  Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence?  Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair?  Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?  Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?  In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds.  He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they came:  and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the time.  Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one’s self.  Grave moderns told us that we must not even say “poor fellow,” of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence.  Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny.  In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane.  Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin.  It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life.  The man who kills a man, kills a man.  The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.  His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage.  For it destroys all buildings:  it insults all women.  The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not:  that is his crime.  He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City.  The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them.  But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.  He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.  There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer.  When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly