ove. I should like to be able to talk frankly and
unaffectedly about books, and interesting people, and the beauties of
nature, and abstract topics of a mild kind, with any one I happened to
meet. But, as a rule, to speak frankly, I find that people of what I
must call the lower class are not interested in these things; people in
what I will call the upper class are faintly interested, in a horrible
and condescending way, in them--which is worse than no interest at all.
A good many people in my own class are impatient of them, and think
of them as harmless recreations; I fall back upon a few like-minded
friends, with whom I can talk easily and unreservedly of such
things, without being thought priggish or donnish or dilettanteish or
unintelligible. The subjects in which I find the majority of people
interested are personal gossip, money, success, business, politics.
I love personal gossip, but that can only be enjoyed in a circle well
acquainted with each other's faults and foibles; and I do not sincerely
care for talking about the other matters I have mentioned. Hitherto I
have always had a certain amount of educational responsibility, and that
has furnished an abundance of material for pleasant talk and interesting
thoughts; but then I have always suffered from the Anglo-Saxon failing
of disliking responsibility except in the case of those for whom one's
efforts are definitely pledged on strict business principles. I cannot
deliberately assume a sense of responsibility towards people in general;
to do that implies a sense of the value of one's own influence and
example, which I have never possessed; and, indeed, I have always
heartily disliked the manifestation of it in others. Indeed, I firmly
believe that the best and most fruitful part of a man's influence, is
the influence of which he is wholly unconscious; and I am quite sure
that no one who has a strong sense of responsibility to the world in
general can advance the cause of equality, because such a sense implies
at all events a consciousness of moral superiority. Moreover, my
educational experience leads me to believe that one cannot do much
to form character. The most one can do is to guard the young against
pernicious influences, and do one's best to recommend one's own
disinterested enthusiasms. One cannot turn a violet into a rose by any
horticultural effort; one can only see that the violet or the rose has
the best chance of what is horribly called self-effe