ing himself, but because he is more likely to do
something that will inconvenience business or society. We can forgive
almost all sins except those that inconvenience us. There are others,
it may be argued, that we hate for their own sake. But is not a part
of our hatred even of these due to the fact that they inconvenience
our minds, having about them something novel or immeasurable? It is in
the last analysis that breaches of codes and conventions shock us
most. If your uncle danced down Piccadilly dressed like a Chinaman,
your sense of propriety would be more outraged than if he appeared in
the Divorce Court, since, bad as the latter is, it is less
bewilderingly abnormal. Mr Wells, in _The Passionate Friends_, offers
a defence of the conventions by which Society attempts to reduce us
all to a common pattern. He sees in them, as it were, angels with
flaming swords against the remorseless individualism that flesh is
heir to. They are a sort of compulsion to brotherhood. They are signs
to us that we must not live merely to ourselves, but that we must in
some way identify ourselves with the larger self of human society. It
is a tempting paradox, and, in so far as it is true, it is a defence
of all the orthodoxies that have ever existed. Every orthodoxy is a
little brotherhood of men. At least, it is so until it becomes a
little brotherhood of parrots. It only breaks down when some horribly
original person discovers the old truth that it is a shocking thing
for men to be turned into parrots, and gives up his life to the work
of rescuing us from our unnatural cages. Perhaps a brotherhood of
parrots is better than no brotherhood at all. But the worst of it is,
the conventions do not gather us into one brood even of this kind.
They sort us into a thousand different painted and chattering groups,
each screaming against the other like, in the vulgar phrase, the
Devil. No: brotherhood does not lie that way. Perched vainly in his
cage of malice and uncharitableness, man feels more like a boss than a
brother. There is nothing so like an average superman as a parrot.

The passion for being shocked, then, must be redeemed from its present
cheapness if it is to help us on the way to being fit for the double
life of the individual and society. We must learn to be shocked by the
normal things--by the conventions themselves rather than by breaches
of the conventions. Those who lift their hands in pious horror over
conventional Christia