drink deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon
us. The failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed
and planned by writers and artists, lies in the absence of all
power to suggest how the happy folk who have conquered all the ills
and difficulties of life are to employ themselves reasonably and
eagerly when there is nothing left to improve. William Morris,
indeed, in his News from Nowhere, confessed through the mouth of
one of his characters that there would be hardly enough pleasant
work, like hay-making and bridge-building and carpentering and
paving, left to go round; and the picture of life which he draws,
with its total lack of privacy, the shops where you may ask for
anything that you want without having to pay, the guest-houses,
with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews
served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing,
the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes
on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity,
because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human
interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is
refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It
will not be enough to have got rid of the combative and sordid and
vulgar elements of the world unless a very active spirit of some
kind has taken its place. Morris himself intended that art should
supply the missing force; but art is not a sociable thing; it is
apt to be a lonely affair, and few artists have either leisure or
inclination to admire one another's work.

Still more dreary was the dream of the philosopher J. S. Mill, who
was asked upon one occasion what would be left for men to do when
they had been perfected on the lines which he desired. He replied,
after a long and painful hesitation, that they might find