d subjects at the mention of which faces lengthen, voices
become grave, and the air thickens with hearty platitudes: the intellect
must be suffered to play freely about everything and everybody. Wit is
the very salt and essence of society, and you can no more have wit that
hurts nothing Queen Victoria respected than you can have truth that
hurts nothing she believed. Now wit is purely an affair of the
intellect, and so is society when it is at all good; no one but a fool
dreams of going there for fine feelings and profound emotions. But the
intellect to be nimble must be free: 'tis a sprite will play you the
prettiest tricks an you give it the run of the house; close but one door
though, and it sits sulking in the lobby. Delightful are the games it
can play you: wit, irony, criticism, thrilling ideas, visions of
fantastic anarchy and breathless generalizations--all these it can give;
but the earth and all things above and below must be its toy-box; from
the deferential intellect expect nothing better than puns, anecdotes,
comfortable platitudes, elaborate facetiousness, and the _Saturday
Westminster_.

I do not suggest that in the spring of 1914 English society was
brilliant or anything of that sort: I think it was tired of being merely
decent. One or two fine ladies had made open-mindedness and a taste for
ideas fashionable: _snobisme_ was doing the rest. And we may as well
recognize, without more ado, that, Athens and Florence being things of
the past, a thick-spread intellectual and artistic _snobisme_ is the
only possible basis for a modern civilization. Thanks chiefly to the
emergence of a layer of this rich and rotten material one had hopes in
1914 of some day cultivating a garden in which artists and writers would
flourish and prophets learn not to be silly. Society before the war
showed signs of becoming what French society before the Revolution had
been--curious, gay, tolerant, reckless, and reasonably cynical. After
the war I suppose it will be none of these things. Like the eighteenth
century, having learnt its lesson, it will borrow a sober tone and
simpler tastes from the _bourgeoisie_.

For the Edwardian culture did not go very deep; the country gentlefolk
and elder business men, the middling professionals and half-pay
officers, never abandoned the Victorian tradition. They could not but
deplore the imprudence of their too affable leaders, whom, nevertheless,
it was their duty and pleasure to admire. They