Told by an Idiot quotes

Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something.

Poor papa has lost his faith again.

”

“Indeed, Vicky, I should be very sorry if you did not all follow your own lights, wherever they lead you.”

Papa’s broad-mindedness amounted to a disease, Vicky sometimes thought.

A queer kind of clergyman he was. What would Father Stanton and Father Mackonochie of St. Alban’s think of him? Father Mackonochie, who was habitually flung into gaol because he would face east when told to face north—as important as all that, he felt it.

Maurice turned to another leader, which began “In these troubled times....”

And certainly they were troubled, as times very nearly always, perhaps quite always, are.

The Observer told news of the Basuto war, the Russian danger in Afghanistan, Land League troubles, danger of war with Spain, trouble in Egypt, trouble in Bulgaria, trouble in Midlothian (where Mr. Gladstone was speaking against the government), trouble of all sorts, everywhere.

There shot into mamma’s mind, not for the first time, a question—had girls always been new? She remembered in her own youth the older people talking about the New Girl, the New Woman.

Were girls and women really always newer than boys and men, or was it only that people noticed it more, and said more about it?

Elderly people wrote to the papers about it. “The Girl of the Period,” in the Saturday Review—fast, painted, scanty of dress (where are our fair, demure English girls gone?) with veils less concealing than provocative ... what, Mrs. Garden wondered, was a provocative veil?

“These troubled times....” Had there ever been, would there ever be, a day when the newspapers said “In these quiet and happy times”? Stanley, inspired by Mr. William Morris, was sure of it.

The millennium was just round the corner, struggling in the womb of time, only it needed workers, workers, and again workers, to deliver it safely.

Some lecturer under whom Stanley had sat had put it like that, and she had repeated it to her mother. Well, of course in these days ... the New Girl, being so new and so free, could use such metaphors. In the fifties you couldn’t;

“These troubled times....”

Had there ever been, would there ever be, a day when the newspapers said “In these quiet and happy times”?

Stanley, inspired by Mr. William Morris, was sure of it. The millennium was just round the corner, struggling in the womb of time, only it needed workers, workers, and again workers, to deliver it safely.

A nice, good, placid child of fifteen, who never thought, never read anything but tosh, talked in slang, and took life as it came, cheerful, unquestioning and serene.

Una was the least clever and the best balanced of the Gardens.

She was going, when she was older, to look rather like the Sistine Madonna.

“Don’t take up weaving and dyeing. It’s shockingly cranky anyway, all this Morris craze of yours.”

“All the best things are thought cranky at first.”

“Don’t you believe it. The new princess dress isn’t.... Now mind, I’m saying this for your good, my dear;

She was a prig and believed that it was up to such as she to reform the world. She saw herself (at the moment, for her vision of herself varied) as the modern woman, clever, emancipated, high-minded, too intellectually fastidious to take the vulgar view.

She took herself seriously, in spite of the childish giggle at the comedy of life which broke like gurgling water through her earnestness.

“The first Nowell the angels did sing,” sang Vicky, in her clear, fluting voice, and danced in at the drawing-room window.

Negligent, foppish and cool, she liked to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts. And the game of life was more varied and entertaining in London than in the country and equally absurd. So Rome preferred London.

It was like having a better seat at the play.

Lack of bodily energy threw her back largely in the country on to the entertainment of her own rather cynical mind. She was often bored, sometimes ill-humoured, sharp and morose. The years might bring her a greater patience, but at twenty she was not patient.

Mamma was a good wife and never joked with her children about papa’s vagaries. No one had ever got behind mamma’s guard in the matter of papa—if it was a guard. Who could see into mamma’s mind, idly speculated Rome.

Mamma had, by forty-five years of age, achieved a kind of delicate impenetrability.

Papa, at fifty, was as limpid as the clear water of a running stream, where you may watch the fishes swimming to and fro, round and round.

Stanley, in a crimson stockinette jersey, tight like an eel’s skin, and a tight little brown skirt caught in at the knees, her chubby face pink with excitement and health, talked of Oxford, of the river, of lectures, of Mr. Pater and of friendship.

Friendship was like dancing flames to Stanley in this her first Oxford year; a radiant, painful apocalypse of joy.

“Are they so splendid?” Rome speculated of these glorious girls. “Is anyone so splendid, ever?”

Stanley was always flinging her whole being prostrate in adoring enthusiasm before someone or something, funny child. She was looking at Rome now in shy, gleaming hesitation, wondering if Rome were despising her, laughing at her, but not able to keep Evelyn Peters to herself.

To say “Evelyn Peters is my friend” was an exquisite æsthetic joy and made their friendship a more real, achieved thing.

Rome felt a little uncomfortable behind her bland nonchalance; Stanley’s emotions were so strong.

And that was all about Malthus that young misses of 1880 needed to know. Or so their elders believed.

But in 1880, as now, young misses often knew more than their parents and grandparents supposed.

Rome and Stanley, better read in history than Vicky, could have enlightened both her and grandpapa on the theme of Malthus.

It was a good thing that grandpapa’s visit ended next day. Without him Maurice was better-mannered, less truculent. They could then discuss Radicalism, Bradlaugh, blasphemy, beauty, Malthus and the elections, en famille, without prejudice.

They were, as a family, immense talkers, inordinate arguers.

The only two who did not discuss life at large were Irving and Una; their conversation was and always would be of the lives they personally led, and those led by such animals as they kept.

“No. Not even marriage. Perhaps, in fact, marriage less than most things. I only said it is, so far as one can infer, Vicky’s job....

The only job worth doing in this curious fantasia of a world, as I see it, is to amuse oneself as well as may be and to get through it with no more trouble than need be.

What else is there?”

They decided that it was a salon when several distinguished people came to it, rather from habit than from accident.

Also the conversation must be reasonably intelligent (or, anyhow, the conversers must believe that it was so, for that is all that can be hoped of any conversation).

And people must come, or pretend that they came, mainly for the talk and not so much for any food there might be, or to show their new clothes.

She had religion, inherited perhaps from her papa, but taking in her a more concentrated and less diffused form. To her the Christian church was a militant church, the sword of God come to do battle for the poor and oppressed.

To her a church was an enchanted house, glorious as a child’s dream, the mass as amazing as a fairy story and as true as sunrise.

She did not much mind at which churches she attended this miracle, but on the whole preferred those of the Anglican establishment to the Roman variety, finding these latter rather more lacking in beauty than churches need be. Stanley was an optimist.

Some children do, indeed, grow up as well as can, in the circumstances, be expected, but this is, as a rule, in spite of, rather than on account of, the misguided efforts of their parents.

And most children do not grow up well at all, but quite otherwise, which is why the world is as we see it.

Vicky was, as parents go, not a bad one. She loved her children, but did not unduly spoil them or turn their heads with injudicious attentions.

Rome said, “Yes, Una’ll be all right. She knows the way to live” ... and was caught by her own phrase into the question, what is the way to live, then? Mine, Una’s, Vicky’s, Stanley’s, Maurice’s, papa’s?

Perhaps there is no way to live. Perhaps the thing is just to live, without a way.

And that is, actually, what Una will do.

You could see, therefore, why Una loved him; you could see it even while he breathed hard at meals in his tight collar, and sucked his knife.

He was physically glorious; a young Antæus strayed by mistake to town.

He and Una were a splendid pair.

THE threshold of the nineties.

Decades have a delusive edge to them.

They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be.

For mating and producing (as a career, not as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing it to too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat.

To be cool, sceptical and passionate at one and the same time—it has been done, but it remains difficult.

To love ardently such absurdities as infants, and yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of all life—this too has been done, but the best parents do not do it.

For printers were paid, and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet. Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never guess from meeting them that anyone would pay them for their ideas.

On the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away; one was then known for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it....

In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others, without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter in their turn.

And possibly it was the case.

Literature has so many new births; it is a hardy annual.

The younger literary people of 1890 had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day. “A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous still brooded over the land like giant trees.

“My dearest,” he said. “Let us stop pretending. Shall we stop pretending? Does our pretence do us or anyone else any good? I love you more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it ... dear heart....”

He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled.

He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.

“For that matter,” Rome joined in, crisp and bland, as if civilisation had not met its débâcle in the drawing-room but a half hour since, “for that matter, what homes have sanctity?

Why do people think that sanctity is particularly to be found in homes, of all places?

And can a bachelor’s or spinster’s home have it, or do the people in the home need to be married?

Then mamma and papa came home, and Rome went upstairs to dress for another dinner party.

Thus do social life and the storm-tossed journey of the human soul run on concurrently, and neither makes way for the other.

Through that winter civilisation fought its losing battle with more primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne.

“Curious,” mused Rome, “not to foresee these developments at the outset, before taking the serious step of marriage.

Marriage is an action too freely practised and too seldom adequately considered.

”

“I tell you I can’t live with her, nor she with me. Do you want to turn my life into a tragi-comic opera?”

“Most life is a tragi-comic opera,” said Rome, trying to smile.

“Perhaps all.”

Was that the choice? Did one either do the decent, difficult thing, and wither to bitterness in doing it, or take the easy road, the road of joy and fulfilment, and be thereby enriched and fulfilled? And what was fulfilment, and what enrichment?

What, ah, what, was this strange tale that life is; what its meaning, what its purpose, what its end?

Rome did not know. She knew one thing only. Frustration, renunciation, death—whether you called your criterion the will of God, or social ethics, or a quixotic whim, or your own private standards of decency and taste, it led you to these;

Mid-day chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her outdoor things, and went forth to meet her papa for lunch.

Life moves on, through whatever deserts, and one must compose oneself to meet it, never betraying one’s soul.

9 VICKY ON THE WORLD

London, Denman, her baby, were far off. She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realising the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close.

To savour the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next—that was life.

Then, presently, the moment lost its keenness, and she was no longer alone with beauty. Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle, looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something;

Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle, looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something; her loneliness, that queer, eerie separateness, that only bachelors and spinsters know.

They need not, to know it, be unattached, virgin bachelors and spinsters; love does not spoil separateness, but households do.

Stanley rose to her feet, brushed the pine-needles from her neat clothes and untidy hair, put on her sailor-hat and got on her bicycle again. Before her there was a long slope down. To take it, brakeless, feet up on the rest, was like flying.

“

It’s better to be elegant, dirty and dangerous than frumpish, clean and safe.

That’s an epigram. The fact is, women ought never to indulge in activities, either of body or mind; it’s not their rôle. They can’t do it gracefully.”

“Oh, yes, dear mamma,” Vicky replied. “Una is fast-rooted in the soil. Country people are always the best balanced.

The only new things Una takes up are bicycles and golf; the only old things she drops are her g’s.

Una is eternal and sublime; there’s nothing of the new woman about her, and nothing of the reactionary, either. There never was anyone less self-conscious, or less conscious of her period. All the rest of us think we’re moderns, but Una knows not times;

“

The world is always new, mamma darling, and always old.

It’s no newer than it was in 1880, or 1870—in fact, not so new, by some years. The only year in which it was really new was, according to grandpapa and the annotators of the Book of Genesis, B.C. 4004.”

… people of the nineties, even as the people of the eighties, seventies, sixties, and so back, and even as the people of the twentieth century, thought they were emancipating themselves from tradition, saw themselves as bold buccaneers sailing uncharted seas, and found it great fun.

The illusion of advance is sustaining, to all right-minded persons, and should by all means be cultivated. It gives self-confidence and poise.

It even seems to please elderly persons to mark or fancy changes of habit, which they have no wish to emulate, among their juniors, and it certainly pleases their juniors to be thus remarked upon, for they, too, believe that they are something new—the new …

Many of its surviving contributors contribute now to these newer journals. But how seldom does one now hear them or their writings or the periodicals to which they contribute called ultra-modern, daring, shocking, decadent or bizarre? Rather, in fact, the contrary.

Thus, it will be observed, do the moderns of one day become the safe establishments of the next.

In ten years the public will be saying of our present moderns, “They are safe. They are vieux jeu. They resemble cathedrals.”

It is thus that I picture posterity—a ponderous suburban bourgeois in mutton-chop whiskers or tight stays, sniffing at our poetry, our wit and our Yellow Book, and saying, ‘How decadent they were in the nineties!’ By the way, what does decadent mean?

I always understood that man fell once and for all, long ago, and could not therefore be falling still.

I prefer deciduous. How deliciously it slides round the tongue, like an over-ripe peach. I wonder it is not more used in verse. To me it suggests a creamy green absinthe, or a long, close kiss on moist, coral-pink lips. Disgusting.

This was the kind of nonsense which Stanley wove to herself during these unbalanced days of her life.

Nonsense, because all generalities about human beings are nonsense.

But many people, including Stanley, find interest in making them up, and it is a harmless game.

but, whatever he may have meant, it is quite true that no period is precisely like another, and that life is, as has been well said, a flux. In brief, panta rei, and no less in the middle nineties than at other times.

Of the many impulsions that drive human beings to one form or another of religion, the strongest, perhaps, is pain.

The other impulsions—conscience, the mystic sense, personal influence, conviction, experimentalism, loneliness, boredom, remorse, and so forth—all work powerfully on their respective subjects.

Her parents did not like it, though Rome’s income, left her by her grandfather, was her own. They did not, in many ways, approve of their clever Rome, so unlike themselves. But on such disapprovals, so Rome assured them, family life is based.

Mutual disapproval, mutual toleration; that is family, as, indeed, so much other, life.

Anyhow, Rome gambled. The older she grew the more greatly and intelligently she gambled. She had her systems, ingeniously worked out, for Monte Carlo.

Then Mr. Donkin returned to the Bar, and Miss Garden drove home in a hansom with the Borzoi and the gleanings from Bond Street. At five she was going to an At Home somewhere; later she was dining out and going to the opera.

Life was full; life was amusing; life hung a brilliant curtain over the abyss.

From the abyss Miss Garden turned her eyes; in it lay love and death, locked bitterly together for evermore.

And then the South African Uitlanders sent complaints and petitions from the Rand, and despatches began to pass between Her Majesty’s government and President Kruger’s.

Despatches are most unfortunate and unwise means of communication; they always make trouble.

There was bound to be war, people began saying. Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Rhodes intended it, and would not be happy till they got it. Probably President Kruger and his Burghers also intended it. Certainly the Uitlanders hoped for it.

A crowd is queer.

A number of individuals gather together for one purpose, and you get not a number of individuals, but a crowd. It is like a new, strange animal, sub-human.

It may do anything. Go crazy with panic, or rage, or excitement, or delight. Now it was enthusiasm that gripped and swayed it, and caused it to shout and sing. Songs rippled over it, starting somewhere, caught from mouth to mouth.

By some fluke, useful Acts may from time to time get passed by any government that happens to be in power. More often, foolish and injurious Acts get passed. Personality and intelligence in ministers do certainly make some difference; but party, it seems, makes none.

The stupid, the inert, the dishonest and the ill-intentioned flourish like bay-trees impartially on both sides of the avenue.

Only the very naïf can believe that party matters, in the long run. This first Parliament of the twentieth century proved, perhaps, even more than usually inept, as parliaments elected during war excitements are apt to be.

It will be seen that papa was ripe for the acceptance of a new creed which had recently come across the Atlantic and was becoming fashionable in this country.

Christian Science fastened on papa like a mosquito, and bit him hard.

It comforted him very much to think that God did not know about the war. He told his grandchildren about this ignorance on the part of the Deity.

Imogen sighed a little. Her mother was so practical. You asked her for doctrine and she gave you advice. Being married, and particularly being a mother, often makes women like that.

They know that doctrine is no use, and cherish the illusion that advice is.

“Papa is very happy in this new no-evil religion he has,” mamma said to Rome. “It suits him very well. Better than theosophy did, I think.”

Imogen sighed a little.

Her mother was so practical. You asked her for doctrine and she gave you advice.

Being married, and particularly being a mother, often makes women like that. They know that doctrine is no use, and cherish the illusion that advice is.

“But how improbable,” Rome mildly expostulated, “that they should manage it any better or any worse than everyone else has. Your maternal pride carries you away, my dear.

Parents can never be clear-sighted; often have I observed it.

Blessed, as the Bible says somewhere, are the barren and they that have not brought forth, for they are the only people with any chance of looking at the world with clear and detached eyes. And even they haven’t much....

One wants to do away with muffling things up, whatever they are. That’s why I tell them everything they ask, so far as I know it, and a lot they don’t.

The knowledge doesn’t matter either way, but the atmosphere of daylight does.

I want them to feel there are no facts that can’t be talked about.”

Imogen was stumped.

You can’t say that puppies are no use.

She could think of no retort but the ancient one of sex insult.

yet the Stop-the-War party did not really trust him. They suspected him of desiring, though without hope, to stop not only the war but all human activities, and indeed the very universe itself; and this is to go further than is generally approved.

The Continue-the-War party has risen and fallen with every war; but the Continue-the-World party has a kind of solid permanency, and something of the universal in its ideals.

Not to be of it is to be out of sympathy with the great majority of one’s fellows.

And meanwhile the war went on, and times were bad, and everywhere people ping-ponged.

A lack of seriousness was complained of. It always is complained of in this country, which is not, indeed, a very serious one, but always contains some serious persons to complain of the others.

“The ping-pong spirit,” the graver press called the national lightness; and clergymen took up the phrase and preached about it.

Round the merry world again. Put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. Round and round and round. What a pennyworth!

You can’t buy much on an English Sunday, but, if you can buy eternal travel, Sunday is justified.

But two Inner Circles and a bit are really enough. If you had three whole ones you might begin to feel bored, or even sick. Sloane Square again; the second circle completed. South Kensington.

“Some day,” thought Imogen, “I’ll write books. Then people can read them without my showing them. I’ll write a book full of poems.” The new poet. Even—might one dare to imagine it—the new great poet, Imogen Carrington. Or should one be anonymous?

Anon. That was a good old poet’s name.

“Few people knew,” said Imogen, within herself, “that this slender book of verse, ‘Questionings,’ bound in green, with gold edges, which had made such a stir in lit’ry London, was by a wiry, brown-faced, blue-eyed young lieutenant-commander, composed while he navigated his first-class gunboat, the …

Ardent progressives hoped much from this party; they even hoped, without grounds, for the removal of sex disabilities in the laws relating to the suffrage, which unlikely matter was part of the programme drawn up in 1905 by the National Liberal Federation.

Life was very glorious to any party, in those Edwardian days, before it got in.

Liberals in opposition were democratic idealists, in office makeshift opportunists, backing out and climbing down.

They can no more see it than they can see that they are touching, or that it is more shocking that women should be killed than that men should, which men see so plainly.

Women, in fact, cannot see why they should not be treated like other persons.

Stanley could not see it.

It was too warm, sweet and drowsy for prolonged remorse. Michael forgot his shame.

The breeze in the pine trees sang like low harps....

The shadowy copse was soaked in piney sweetness, golden and dim. Michael, with his bow, his Redskins, and his broken honour, faded out in the loveliness of the hour.

That was how poems came, and that was life at its sharpest, its highest intensity. Afterwards, one sent them to papers, and it was pleasant and gratifying if other people saw them and liked them too. But all that was a side-issue.

Vanity is pleasant, gratified ambition is pleasant, earning money is very pleasant, but these are not life at its highest power.

You might at once burn every poem you wrote, but you would still have known life.

But all that was a side-issue. Vanity is pleasant, gratified ambition is pleasant, earning money is very pleasant, but these are not life at its highest power.

You might at once burn every poem you wrote, but you would still have known life.

The song the pines hummed became words, half formed, drifting, sweet.... Imogen listened, agape, like an imbecile. It was a lovely, jolly, woody thing that was being sung to her ... she murmured it over....

They would spring forth and grip her, turning the dædal earth to magic, at any lovely hour, in wood or lane or street, or among the wavering candles and the bread and wine.

She was stabbed through and through with beauty sweet as honey and sharp as a sword, and it was as if her heart must break in her at its turning.

After this brief intensity of joy or pain, whichever it was, it was as if something in her actually did break, scattering loose a drift of pent-up words. That was how poems came.

A bell rang, far away.

Sharply time’s voice shivered eternity to fragments.

Imogen yawned, got up, brushed pine needles out of her hair and clothes, took up her bow, and strolled out of fairyland. It was tea-time at the farm.

He sank into inert grief, from which he was roused, in March 1907, by the call of Higher Thought. The name, in the first instance, appealed to him.

Thought should be higher; it was usually lower, and very certainly much too low.

“Higher than what, papa dear?” Rome enquired. “These comparatives, in the air, are so unfinished. Higher education, higher criticism, the larger hope, the younger generation.... Higher, I mean than what other thought?”

Only don’t you think suffragists do too, sometimes? I mean, Aunt Stanley, people do so, when they talk, get off the point, don’t they. It would be a lot easier to be keen if people didn’t talk so much. They talk round, not along.

Really, there’s hardly anything to say about anything; I mean, you could say it all, all that mattered, in a few sentences.

But people go on talking about things for hours, saying the same things twice, and a lot of other things that don’t really apply, and everything in hundreds of words when quite a few would do.

Miss Horniman’s Repertory Theatre toured the provinces; and the Abbey Theatre players took English audiences by storm. Acting was good, literature and the arts were much encouraged, dancing and social entertainments were more than ever the fashion. Society, it was said, was getting rowdier.

For that matter, society has always been getting rowdier, since the dawn of time. How rowdy it will end, in what nameless orgies it will be found at the Last Day, is a solemn thought indeed.

As to the young they were thought of and written of much as ever, much as now. The New Young were discovered afresh, and the Edwardian variety was much like the Victorian and the Georgian. They were wild, people said; they went their own way;

It has set out on a voyage of enquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful, others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and of knowledge....”

Youth was, in fact, at it again.

“Girls are so wild in these days,” Vicky cheerfully complained. “Nancy and Imogen both go on in a way we’d never have dared to do.

But now style, the stark, bare structure of language, was to her a fetish. It was good to be getting on in life—twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six—so that one’s head was clearer, if not yet very clear.

The very young, thought Imogen, are muddled; they love cant and shun truth; they adopt and use imitative phrases; they are sentimental and easy idealists behind their masks of cheerful, slangy hardness.

Undergraduates, male and female, and their non-collegiate contemporaries, are the most obscurantist of reactionaries; facts annoy them and they pretend they do not see them, preferring to walk muffled through life, until life forcibly, year by year, tears the bandages from their eyes.

I don’t feel things much. I am not easily moved by life.... Why did people so seldom say that, and so much more seldom think it? No doubt because everyone feels things terrifically, is quite horribly moved by this most moving business, life.

No one believes him or herself to be insensitive, for no one is insensitive, life not being an affair it is possible to be insensitive to.

In a deeper layer of consciousness, where herself watched herself, Imogen thought that, though she might believe herself to be sensitive to life, she at any rate knew why she believed it, knew why everyone believed it of himself, and that redeemed her from the …

People wrote and wrote, and nearly every kind of thing got written by someone or other, well or ill, usually ill, and never so well as to touch more than the very outside edge of the beauty and adventure which was life.

Written words opened the door, that was all. Beyond the door lay the adventure, bright and still and eerily clear, like a dream.

Strange seas, purple with racing currents in the open, but under the eaves of coral islands green and clear like jade; white beaches of those same islands, hot in the sunshine under the spreading leaves of bread-fruit trees;

Then why write of what should, instead, be lived? Wasn’t the marvellous heritage, the brilliant joke, the ghostly dream, of life enough? Nevertheless, one did write, and was, inexplicably, praised for it.

Black marks on paper, scribbled and niggled and scrawled—and here and there the splendour and the joke and the dream broke through them, like sunshine flashing through prison bars, like music breaking through the written notes.

While she gave to the fashioning of the written word all the fastidious, meticulous austerity of devotion that she knew, Imogen in her personal life was not austere or fastidious or devoted at all. She idled; she lounged about; she was slovenly;

(Only there might be babies, and that would be all wrong, because they would want bathing or something just when you were busy with something else.) Or to come home to no one; or (better still) not to come home at all.

So many habits of life were enjoyable, but not that of perpetual unsuitable companionship.

Thus Imogen reflected and philosophised on this great topic of marriage and of love, which did not, however, really interest her so much as most other topics, for she regarded it as a little primitive, a little elementary, lacking in the more entertaining complexities of …

Metaphysics, poetry, psychology and geography made to her a stronger intellectual appeal; the non-emotional functionings of the dwellers on this planet she found more amusing, and the face of the planet itself more beautiful.

Nevertheless, to be a little in love is fun, and makes enchantment of the days. A little in love, a little taste of that hot, blinding cup—but only enough to stimulate, not to blind.

One is so often a little in love....

“Doesn’t make much odds, anyhow,” he reflected gloomily. “One damn silly job or another. Mother’ll never let me do what I want. ’Tisn’t good enough for her. I wish people wouldn’t want things for one; wish they’d let one alone.

Being let alone ... that’s the thing.

”

Rome said, “Why? Taking your hypothesis, that there is another life, why should it be supposed to be a revelation of the truth about the universe, or about God? Why should not papa go on speculating and guessing at truth, trying new faiths?

You people who believe in what you call heaven seem to have no justification for making it out such an informed place.

”

So, if you think of papa in heaven, why not think of him in the state in which he would certainly be happiest and most himself—still exploring for truth?

Why should death bring a sudden knowledge of all the secrets of the universe?

You believers make so many and such large and such unwarrantable assumptions.”

“

My dear, we must make assumptions, or how get through life at all?

”

But those are hypothetical, pragmatical assumptions, for the purposes of action; there is no call actually to believe them, intellectually. And still less call to increase their number, and carry assumptions into spheres where it doesn’t help us to action at all.

For my part, I assume practically a great deal, intellectually nothing.

”

But daily work in an office, so cheerful, so fruitless, so absurd, was an anodyne. Offices were full of people who did not mind the war, who, some of them, rather enjoyed the war.

There are no places more cynical than the offices of governments. Not parliaments in session, not statesmen in council, not cardinals in conclave, not even journalists emitting their folly in the dead of the night.

Encased in an armour of this easy cynicism against the savage darts of the most horrid war, Imogen and many others drifted through its last years to the war’s cynical culmination, the horrid but welcome peace.

But at first the fact that it was peace, that people were not killing each other (in such large numbers and for such small reasons) any more, was enough and made everyone happy.

A poor peace enough; but the fact remains that the worst peace is heaven compared with the best war.

It was like the first return of chocolate éclairs. “They’re rather funny ones,” people said, “not quite like the old kind; but still, they are éclairs.” So peace. It was indeed a rather funny one, not quite like the old kind;

Wiser were those who encouraged the infant, patted it on the back, and greeted the unseen with a cheer. Like beer, like shoeleather, it seemed costly and poor. But who are we, that we can afford to be particular?

We should make the best of whatever peace is given us, even if it is not the brand we should have preferred.

“We’ve got,” said the resigned citizen, “to put up with these poor, nasty-looking things, that last no time at all. Beer it’s not, and shoeleather it’s not, and peace it won’t be, properly speaking. A kind of substitute they all are, like margarine.

Idealists, such as Stanley Croft, though they did not admire the Treaty of Versailles, saw it as the material out of which the living temple of peace might yet be built, on that great cornerstone, the League of Nations.

The League of Nations was to the peace-wishers as his creed is to the Christian; it bound them to believe in a number of difficult, happy, unlikely and highly incompatible things, such as lasting peace, the freedom of small nations, arbitration between large ones, and so forth.

They joined the League of Nations Union, full of hope and faith. Stanley did so, at its inception, and became, in fact, a speaker on platforms in the cause.

Certainly nothing could, said Rome. Nothing ever had yet. At least, what did people mean, precisely, by save? Words, words, words. They signified, as commonly and lightly used, so very little.

The post-war period swung and jolted along, like a crazy, broken-down charabanc full of persons of varying degrees of mental weakness, all out on an asylum treat.

Every now and then the charabanc stopped for a picnic, or conference, at some nice continental or English watering-place, and these were very cosy, chatty, happy, expensive little times, enjoyed by all, and really not doing very much more harm to Europe than any other …

Do the qualities depend upon their age, or upon the period of the world’s history in which they happen to be that age?” But no precise or satisfactory reply was ever given. It never is.

Enquirers into the exact meaning of popular theories and phrases are of all persons the least and the worst answered.

You may, for instance, enquire of a popular preacher, or anyone else, who denounces his countrymen as “pagan” (as speakers, and even Bishops, at religious gatherings have been known to do), what exactly he means by this word, and you will find that he means …

Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance.

The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation.

“Will these qualities wear off?” precise-minded and puzzled enquirers asked. “When the present young are thirty and middle-aged, will they still possess them?

And, whatever Bishops mean by pagan, as applied to modern Englishmen, it is almost certain that they do not mean all this.

Never, perhaps, was thinking, writing and talking looser, vaguer and more sentimental than in the years following the European war. It was as if that disaster had torn great holes in the human intelligence, which it could ill afford.

There was much writing both of verse and of prose, much public and private speaking much looking for employment and not finding it, much chat about the building of new houses, much foolish legislation, much murder and suicide, much amazement on the part of the …

Many women, including Stanley Croft, who of course stood herself, found this very disheartening.

It seemed that the only chance for a woman who desired a political career was to marry a member and then put him out of action.

Such women as were political in their own persons, who were educated and informed on one or more public topics, had small chance. “We don’t want to be ruled by the ladies,” the electorate firmly maintained. “It’s not their job. Their place is ...” etc.

In that far, bright, clear, alien place, beyond the drifting mists, perhaps thought too was lucid and unconfused, not the desperate, mist-bound, storm-driven, helpless business it was in London.

In London all values and all meanings were fluid, were as windy clouds, drifting and dissolving into strange shapes.

Life bore too intense, too passionate an emotional significance; personal relationships were too tangled; clear thought was drowned in desire. One could not see life whole, only a flame, a burning star, at its heart.

In London all values and all meanings were fluid, were as windy clouds, drifting and dissolving into strange shapes.

Life bore too intense, too passionate an emotional significance; personal relationships were too tangled; clear thought was drowned in desire.

One could not see life whole, only a flame, a burning star, at its heart.

In London all values and all meanings were fluid, were as windy clouds, drifting and dissolving into strange shapes. Life bore too intense, too passionate an emotional significance; personal relationships were too tangled; clear thought was drowned in desire.

One could not see life whole, only a flame, a burning star, at its heart.

Through years and years this could not go on; the entanglement of circumstance, the enmeshing of soul and will, was too close for any unravelling; it could only be cut.