e-minded, but it shows itself so entirely unimaginative and inane
that it is no wonder that the charlatan in religion, politics, and
education rampages over the world through a perfect maelstrom of
bouquets. Nothing impersonal ever seems to stir the sluggishness of
their "souls." They feel nothing that does not hit them straight
between the eyes. They never perceive the tragedy behind the smile,
the wrong behind the justice of the law, the piteousness and
helplessness of men and women. The price of currants stirs them to
revolt far more rapidly than that disgrace to civilisation which are
the slums. Air raids were the greatest injustice of the war--air
raids, when they never knew from one moonlight night to another if they
might not join unwillingly the army of the heroic dead in heaven. That
is why so many of them secretly believe that they endured far more at
home than the ordinary common soldier did in the front-line trenches.
They cannot realise _his_ tragedy; they can, however, fully realise
their own. That is why they talk of it with so much greater eloquence;
that is why, when they listen to his recitals of dirt and hunger and
indescribable pain, they do so with a suppressed yawn and a secret
conviction that they have heard quite enough about the war. As for
tragedy--their apotheosis of the tragic is reached in a street accident
at which they can stand gaping, nursing the details for the moment when
they can retail them with gusto at home; but I verily believe that, if
the dying man cut rather a ridiculous figure, _some of them would have
to laugh_. But then, this inane and unimaginative percentage among the
crowd is always ready _to laugh_. Their special genius is that they
will always guffaw in the wrong place. Or, if they do not laugh, they
will let fall some utterly stupid remark--so stupid that one wonders
occasionally if nature by mistake has given them a bird's brain without
giving them at the same time a bird's beautiful plumage. And the worst
of it is one is up against this inane percentage in every walk of
life--this unimaginative army of men and women who can perceive
_nothing_ which does not absolutely concern themselves and their own
soul's comfort.

Life's Great Adventure

I hope when I am old that Fate will give me a garden and a view of the
sea. I should hate to decay in a suburban row and be carried away at
the end of all my mostly fruitless longings in a hearse; the seven
mi