The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

connected with a general decay of civilised
standards such as must have occurred in Rome
after the Augustan age. Men and women appear to
have become incapable of enjoying the more
intellectual pleasures. The art of general
conversation, for example, brought to perfection in
the French salons of the eighteenth century, was
still a living tradition forty years ago. It was a very
exquisite art, bringing the highest faculties into
play for the sake of something completely
evanescent. But who in our age cares for anything
so leisurely? In China the art still flourished in
perfection ten years ago, but I imagine that the
missionary ardour of the Nationalists has since
then swept it completely out of existence. The
knowledge of good literature, which was universal
among educated people fifty or a hundred years
ago, is now confined to a few professors. All the
quieter pleasures have been abandoned.
Some American students took me walking in the
spring through a wood on the borders of their
campus; it was filled with exquisite wild flowers,