第36章

Of how many dwellings can it be said that no word of anger is ever heard beneath its roof, and that no unkindly feeling ever exists between the inmates? Most men's experience would seem to justify them in declaring that, throughout the inhabited world, no such house exists.I, knowing at all events of one, admit the possibility that there may be more; yet I feel that it is to hazard a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to any other instance, nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has quitted the world) could I have named a single example.

It is so difficult for human beings to live together; nay, it is so difficult for them to associate, however transitorily, and even under the most favourable conditions, without some shadow of mutual offence.Consider the differences of task and of habit, the conflict of prejudices, the divergence of opinions (though that is probably the same thing), which quickly reveal themselves between any two persons brought into more than casual contact, and think how much self-subdual is implicit whenever, for more than an hour or two, they co-exist in seeming harmony.Man is not made for peaceful intercourse with his fellows; he is by nature self-assertive, commonly aggressive, always critical in a more or less hostile spirit of any characteristic which seems strange to him.That he is capable of profound affections merely modifies here and there his natural contentiousness, and subdues its expression.Even love, in the largest and purest sense of the word, is no safeguard against perilous irritation and sensibilities inborn.And what were the durability of love without the powerful alliance of habit?

Suppose yourself endowed with such power of hearing that all the talk going on at any moment beneath the domestic roofs of any town became clearly audible to you; the dominant note would be that of moods, tempers, opinions at jar.Who but the most amiable dreamer can doubt it? This, mind you, is not the same thing as saying that angry emotion is the ruling force in human life; the facts of our civilization prove the contrary.Just because, and only because, the natural spirit of conflict finds such frequent scope, does human society hold together, and, on the whole, present a pacific aspect.