There is a great deal of truth in this, and it is manfully put.  Where it fails is, I think, in assuming an amount of will-power and resolution in human character, which I suspect is not there.  The system the writer recommends is a system that a strong character instinctively practises, moving through sentiment to emotion, naturally, and by a sturdy growth.  But to tell a man to feel more in a thing, is like telling a man to be intelligent, benevolent, wise.  It is just what no one can do.  The various grades of emotion are not things like examinations, in which one can successively graduate.  They are expressions of temperament.  The sentimental man is the man who can go thus far and no farther.  How shall one acquire vigour and generosity?  By behaving as if one was vigorous and generous, when one is neither?  I do not think it can be done in that way.  One can do something to check a tendency, very little to deepen it.  What the writer calls false asceticism is the only brave and wholesome refuge of people, who know themselves well enough to know that they cannot trust themselves.  Take the case of one’s relations with other people.  If a man drifts into sentimental relations with other people, attracted by charm of any kind, and knowing quite well that the relation is built on charm, and that he will not be able to follow it into truer regions, I think he had probably better try to keep himself in check, not embrace a sentimental relation with a mild hope that it may develop into a real devotion.  The strong man may try experiments, even though he burns his fingers.  The weak man had better not meddle with the instruments and fiery fluids at all.

I am myself just strong enough to dislike sentiment, to turn faint in the sickly, mawkish air.  But I am not strong enough to charge it with vivid life.  Moreover, the danger of a strong character taking up the anti-ascetic position is that he is apt to degenerate into a man like Goethe, who plucked the fragrant blooms on every side, and threw them relentlessly away when he had inhaled their sweetness.  That is a cruel business, unless there is a very wise and tender heart behind.

Yet again, reconsidering the whole problem, I am not sure that the whole suggestion, taken as advice, is not at fault.  I think it is making a melancholy, casuistical, ethical business out of what ought to be a natural process.  I think it is vitiated by a principle which vitiates so much of the advice of moralists, the principle that one ought to aim at completeness and perfection.  I don’t believe that is the secret of life—­indeed I think it is all the other way.  One must of course do one’s best to resist immoral, low, sensuous tendencies; but otherwise I believe that one ought to drink as much as one’s glass can hold of pure and beautiful influences.  If sentiment is the nearest that a man can come to emotion, I think he had better take it thankfully.  It is this ethical prudence which is always weighing issues, and