ow that the object is small in
itself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great
in itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admire
people for being excited. An American so struggling for some
disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in a
mystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be
keen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels
he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society
behind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one leg
in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity
is at rest. That is what he means when he says he is bound to come to
the lecture.

Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. But these things are not
larks; nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman's
lark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even
when he does it. Being English myself, I like it; but being English
myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. In its
irony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. This patronage
is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic
tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of
leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy
of the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred
windows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can be
trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a
trifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was bound
to smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick-bed
to smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all;
he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving or
sliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of
the English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into something
entirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly not
think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred
English things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of
proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for
somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping
rather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into
rowdiness there is a sort of relapse int