romance_--that is the word!--the _romance_ of
their lives is never mirrored in their souls. And the realisation of
this has sometimes led me to imagine that--it was always so! I mean
that there was nothing poetic to Hercules about the Augean task, when
the pungent smell of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he bent a
sweat-dewed face to that mighty scavenging once more: that there was
nothing poetic to Caesar about the Rubicon: nothing poetic to Clive
about India. The world seems to have an invincible prejudice against
men who see the romance in the work they are doing. The footballing,
cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works
in an office in Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons's, and plays
football at Shepherd's Bush, sees no romance in his own life, which is
in reality thrilling with adventure, but thinks Captain Kettle the
hero of an ideal existence. Captain Kettle, bringing coal from Dunston
Staiths to Genoa, suffers day after day of boredom, and reads Marie
Corelli and Hall Caine with a relish only equalled by the girl
typewriters in the second-class carriages of the eight-fifteen up from
Croydon or Hampstead Heath. These people cannot see the sunlight of
romance shining on their own faces! I observe in myself a frantic
resentment when I fail to convince the other officers that they are
heroes. They regard such crazy notions as dangerous and scarcely
decent. You can now perceive why religion occasionally gains such a
hold upon these men. To be uplifted about work, or nature, or love,
is derogatory to their dignity as bond-slaves of the industrial world;
but in the realms of the infinite future, in the Kingdom of God, where
"there shall be no more sea," their souls break away from the
harbour-mud, and they put out on the illimitable ocean of belief.

VI

It is so long since I set my hand to paper that I am grown rusty! I
did not write you from Madeira--that is true. One cannot write from
Madeira when "Madeira" means a plunging vortex of coal-dust, a blazing
sun, and the unending roar of the winches as they fish up ton after
ton of coal. Moreover, I was boarded by a battalion of fleas from the
Spanish labourers in my vicinity--fleas that had evidently been
apprenticed to their trade, and had been allowed free scope for the
development of their ubiquitous genius. I looked at the old rascal who
tallied the bags with me, envisaged in parchment, and clothed in
picturesque remnants,