will be so great as to be
free from all commonplace and convention. Honesty is to be practically
the only virtue in the new world. If you say what you mean, you will
earn the right to do anything else that you please. Mr. Wells in this is
the counterpart of those plain men in private life so well known to us
all, who perpetually remind us that they are people who call a spade a
spade. Such men are apt to interpret this dictum as a kind of charter
which enables a man to say anything foolish, or rude, or bad that may
occur to him, and earn praise for it instead of blame. Some of us fail
to find the greatness of this way of thinking, however much we may be
impressed by its audacity. Indeed there seems to be much smallness in it
which masquerades as immensity.

This smallness is due first of all to sheer ignorance. When a man tells
us that he prefers Oliver Goldsmith to Jesus Christ, he merely shows
that upon the subject he is discussing he is not educated, and does not
know what he is talking about. A second source of pettiness is to be
found in the mistake of imagining that mere smartness of diction and
agility of mind are signs of intellectual keenness. The mistake is as
obvious as it is unfortunate. Smartness can be learned with perhaps the
least expenditure of intellect that is demanded by any literary exercise
of the present day. It is a temptation which a certain kind of clever
man always has to face, and it only assumes a serious aspect when it
leads the unthinking to mistake it for a new and formidable element of
opposition to things which he has counted sacred.

The whole method is not so very subtle after all. Pick out a vice or a
deformity. Do not trouble to acquaint yourself too intimately with the
history of morals in the past, but boldly canonise your vice or your
deformity with ritual of epigram and paradox. Proclaim loudly and
eloquently that this is your faith, and give it a pathetic aspect by
dwelling tenderly upon any trouble which it may be likely to cost those
who venture to adopt it. It is not perhaps a very admirable way to deal
with such subjects. The whole world of tradition and the whole
constitution of human nature are against you. Men have wrestled with
these things for thousands of years, and they have come to certain
conclusions which the experience of all time has enforced upon them. By
a dash of bold imagination you may discount all that laborious past, and
leave an irrevocable stain upon