aged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the
difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with
by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life;
it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those
things it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalist
interval between mediaeval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the
sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in their
souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent
paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead;
those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered
eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very
formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other
complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism
was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club;
which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively
orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in
the middle-class masterpiece about "Northanger Abbey," where we actually
remember it is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey.
Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the
atheism of Jane Austen.

Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of
another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an
aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret
and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortable
paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be
descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but he
himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come
from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come
over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted, in a somewhat
shuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His own
exploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans
or the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off
founders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the great
gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman
knights, but their position was worse; for the marshals might be
descended from