Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian
manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the
delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his
assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even
reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of
the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic
feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an
ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness
from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes
that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always
operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the
Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his
trousers, or that the 'health of humanity' softens the momentary
phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o'clock in the
morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail
of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the
doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worth
while as a whole.
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