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REDEEMED FROM REALITY 103 and our natural sympathy with our kind, will call this pleasure immoral and anti-social. I have no wish to maintain that in his eyes it can be other-wise ; for an essential part of it is the complete escape it offers us from him, and from all the con-ditions that have produced him and made him intelligible. The moralist of the type of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the scientific moralist, whose dogmatism about man in the abstract is based for the most part on a guileless and scholarly ignorance of the ways and passions of men and women in the concrete, amuses himself with the idea that pleasures become more pleasurable in proportion as we know them to be shared by a number of other people. I can assure him that the pleasures of the true traveller are great in proportion as he has them all to himself, or at all events in proportion as the general public is debarred from them. Another element in these pleasures is even more scandalous, and that element is absence of social duties'. The true traveller has never reached the goal of his travels till he reaches a land in which all such duties vanish—even the suggestion of them. Then the spell begins to be woven round him. The men and women he sees are no longer fellow-citizens, but figures moving in a magician's crystal. The streets and gardens he passes through all belong to fairyland, and take the colour of his own longings and fancies, just like the woman seen by Faust on the Brocken, who to each man looking at her had the likeness of the woman

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