We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names.  The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing.  Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas.  They sipped theology with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a vigorous relish.  Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited, and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force.  Then again the intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke.  In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity.  But now we seem to have settled down comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on delicate instruments.  The trumpet and the horn are silent.

Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science, the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be known, not to form conclusions without evidence.  But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment.  Not in such a mood as this does humanity fare further and higher.  Men become cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and high-hearted.

But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake.  The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law.  What is rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely, to encourage rather than to condemn, Serviendum lietandum says the brave motto.  To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with blitheness, that is the secret.

XXII

I cannot help wondering what the substance was which my fellow-traveller to-day was consuming under the outward guise of cigarettes.  It had a scent that was at once strange and afflicting.  It was no more like tobacco than tobacco is like violets.  It seemed as though it must have been carefully prepared and procured for some unknown purpose, but it was impossible to connect pleasure with it.  It had a corroding mineral scent, and must have been digged,