probably only our Home Secretary could tell us, after he had made quite
sure he would not be overheard by a white and tense believer in the
Hidden Hand. Thank God Heine was a Jew, though even so there are rumours
that a London memorial to him is to be removed. And last night I heard it
expounded very seriously, by a clever man of letters, that Carlyle's day
is done. Few people read Carlyle to-day--and it may be supposed that as
they read they hold his volumes with a Hidden Hand--and fewer still love
him, for at heart he was a Prussian. He was, indeed, slain in our
affections by Frederick the Great. His shrine at Chelsea is no longer
visited. It is all for the best, because in any case he wrote only a
gnarled and involved bastard stuff of partly Teutonic origin. While this
appeal was being made to me, I watched the face of a cat, which got up
and stretched itself during the discourse, with some hope; but that
animal looked as though it were thinking of its drowned kittens. It was
the last chance, and the cat did not laugh. On my way home, thinking of
that grave man of letters and of his serious and attentive listeners, I
noticed even the street lights were lowered or doused, and remembered
that every wine-shop was shut. London is enough to break one's heart. If
only by some carelessness one of the angels failed to smother his great
laughter over us, and we heard it, we might, in awakening embarrassment,
the first streak of dawn, put a stop to what had been until that moment
an unconscious performance.

XI. Holiday Reading

AUGUST 31, 1918. I make the same mistake whenever the chance of a holiday
broadens and brightens. A small library, reduced by a process of natural
selection, helps to make weighty the bag. But I do not at once close the
bag; a doubt keeps it open; I take out the books again and consider them.
When the problem of carrying those volumes about faces me, it is a relief
to discover how many of them lose their vital importance. Yet a depraved
sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such writers as Marcus
Aurelius have done for me, refuses to allow every volume to be
jettisoned. It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious books
which there has been no time to examine. They are books that require a
close focus, a long and steady concentration, a silent immobility hardly
distinguishable from sleep. This year for instance I notice Jung's
_Analytical Psychology_ confidently expecting to go f