her not
possessed of his security or discontented with it. The impulses that
took his school friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adventures
struck him as needless. As he grew up he turned with an equal distrust
from passion or ambition. His friends went out after love, after
adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this or that desire, and
became men. But he noted merely that they became fleshly, that effort
strained them, that they were sometimes angry or violent or heated. He
could not but feel that theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought
some finer exercise for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or
philosophy or literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised
more and more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about
him, and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things
nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the Press,
the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich, the baseness
of common people in his own land. The world overseas had by comparison
a certain glamour. Except that when you said "United States" to him he
would draw the air sharply between his teeth and beg you not to...

Nobody took him by the collar and shook him.

If our world had considered the advice of William James and insisted
upon national service from everyone, national service in the drains or
the nationalised mines or the nationalised deep-sea fisheries if not
in the army or navy, we should not have had any such men. If it had
insisted that wealth and property are no more than a trust for the
public benefit, we should have had no genteel indispensables. These
discords in our national unanimity are the direct consequence of our bad
social organisation. We permit the profiteer and the usurer; they evoke
the response of the Reluctant Employee, and the inheritor of their
wealth becomes the Genteel Whig.

But that is by the way. It was of course natural and inevitable that the
German onslaught upon Belgium and civilisation generally should strike
these recluse minds not as a monstrous ugly wickedness to be resisted
and overcome at any cost, but merely as a nerve-racking experience. Guns
were going off on both sides. The Genteel Whig was chiefly conscious
of a repulsive vast excitement all about him, in which many people did
inelegant and irrational things. They waved flags--nasty little flags.
This child of the ages, this last fruit of the gigantic and tr