ABSTRACT
“We are Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. We cannot be. ‘To be or not to be’—it is the question with us now, by Jove. And nearly every Englishman says, ‘Not to be.’ So he goes in for Humanitarianism and such like forms of not-being. The real way of living is to answer to one’s wants. Not ‘I want to light up with my intelligence as many things as possible’—but ‘For the living of my full flame—I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep. I want to go to the pub and have a good time. I want to look a beastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man.’ Instead of that, all these wants, which are there whether-or-not, are utterly ignored, and we talk about some sort of ideas. I’m like Carlyle, who, they say, wrote 50 volumes on the value of silence.”
