TS

It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically
delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen the
first white light, when it comes in by a window, knows that daylight is
not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety
of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism,
and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of
verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender
as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended,
might very well summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beaten
about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine
and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most
threadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truth
to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have
too often degenerated into dead jokes. The expression "hearts of oak,"
for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that England
of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it
covers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made into
bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English gentry did
not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name
of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of
colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate,
almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Some
part of that world at least will not perish; for its autumnal glow
passed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, more
than any other men, were given the power to commemorate the large
humanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and soft as
their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upon
a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great
and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist
gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine
quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and
words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh
before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never
heard before: "For England, home, and beauty."

When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at
the great gentry that w