that,
even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still.
Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the
matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may
still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think
there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit
that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is
innocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether untrue, still less is
it unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls'
houses. It is the true tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has
grown too big to live in a doll's house. These things seem somehow to
escape the irony of time by not even challenging it; they are too
temporary even to be merely temporal. These people are not building
tombs; they are not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell's poem, merely
building ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a doll's house;
and that is why a doll's house is an everlasting habitation. How far it
promises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion; I am
only describing the mood of discovery; in which all these cottages built
of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed coloured like
the clouds of morning; which are both fugitive and eternal.

There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in another sense from
the nursery. We hear much of Americans being educated on English
literature; but I think few Americans realise how much English children
have been educated on American literature. It is true, and it is
inevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old-fashioned
American literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly
the limitations of the young American millionaire, and especially the
staleness of his English culture; but there is necessarily another side
to it. If the American talked more of Macaulay than of Nietzsche, we
should probably talk more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether this
staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a different
question. But, in any case, it is true that the old American books were
often the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the books
of our nursery. I know few men in England who have not left their
boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of _Huckleberry
Finn_. I know few women in England, from the most revolutionary
Suffragette to the mo