e, the uncle must have died in war, for otherwise, his sword would be hanging on his own wall, if at all. Thirdly, what is the importance to the stanza or poem of this past present to sight? The sword is followed by talk of a rector’s mother. These two things recall the old aristocratic order. These are two of the objects that relate to the past. This second stanza is about reasons to live, what there is to look forward to if one does not commit suicide. But this is the only one which might move a man to life. Why should that be? A soldier is tied up with death! Recall the opposition of future and past, money and honor. A soldier lives for his country and risks death for her, whereas a suicide cannot reasonably be said to be serving his country, or acting for anyone but himself. The family example further strengthens a kind of duty, because of likeness. One should not be unworthy of one’s own. The nearness in time and generations further suggests that honor is a living possibility, perhaps not only in war. All this leads to another, more serious matter. Manliness is the first of the moral virtues, without which no other is possible. Manliness is the man’s self-defense, but it extends to his own. A man then can hold his country as his own and defend it, but also principles. A man standing up for himself is implicitly standing up for man’s dignity. In what does this dignity consist? Why is man worth defending? In the very question we find the beginning of our answer: Manliness presupposes and affirms man’s ability to act. Human action is held to be worthy, and, implicitly, possible. That affirms the special dignity of man among the other beings. Man’s dignity is what a man needs to assert in order not to commit suicide.
The third stanza is taken up with a contempt for the most famous and most sophisticated educated people in Britain, then the world empire. There is a corruption in this sophistication, and it earns its natural or poetic punishment. The decadents do decay, irrespective of the truth or falsity of their implicit claim: that morality is a delusion, and that a romantic suffering, worshiped, is preferable to decency. The pedants pall, irrespective of the truth or falsity of their own implicit claim, that a preciseness of language is more important than attention to the things of which we speak. These two attitudes are simply coeval with civilization, and seem to be degenerated forms of moral and intellectual virtues, answers to the purposelessness that sometimes attends on peaceful prosperity. It’s perhaps worth noticing that they belong properly in a world from which strife has been banished.
That this is really a question about education and enlightenment is made clear in the sequel: After the question about learning how to live comes the question concerning children. Is it really possible that very famous writers, the most influential in their generation, the proudest flowers of Edwardian England, much in the news concerning the Nobel Prize of Literature, not know what children are like? Can human nature be concealed behind ideology? I’ll add, strife was not unknown to Wells and Shaw, but it had a utopian quality, it was about progress, social and psychological. It is the uselessness of play, as opposed to rational control of life through scientific means, that baffles the efforts to uplift mankind; it is the natural evil of the human being, the chaotic striving, innocent of any class consciousness or social project, that baffles the efforts to ennoble mankind at the price of any individual freedom. That rationalists are growing rational means nothing else than they are becoming acquainted with human things, which they had held in contempt.
But then you see a striking change, one last lone image of mere nature—a thing you’d have to leave the city just to see, a thing both plain and secret, known to those who try to find it and to follow in its winding way. It is not unlikely, given the theme of the stanza, that a stream astray is an image intended to recall soul. Here, nature and chance are visible apart from 