The impression one got from the newspapers and magazines and popular books was of a sort of exuberant irrelevance, a vivacity of interest about matters that seemed quite alien to the personal and social issues of life as one knew it. There seemed indeed to be a direct avoidance of these issues. One could never discover whether or how much an Englishman “cared.” The national mind seemed to have made a sort of permanent derangement of intellect from emotion. In no country is so large a proportion of the literary product a mere hobby of leisurely gentlemen whose interests are quite elsewhere. The literary supplements of the newspapers used to contain the greatest collection of futilities that I ever saw. One got the impression that the intellectual life of the country was “hobbyized,” that ideas were taken as sports, just as sports were taken as serious issues. This impression was rather confirmed at Oxford, where the anthropologist, Marrett, turned out to be a Jersey country gentleman, digging up prehistoric bones on his place, and mentioning Chesterton as “entertaining writer--even had him down here to lunch, but not a ‘gentleman,’ you know, not a ‘gentleman.’” Oxford itself seemed to be one long play of schoolboys in the soft damp November air. Schiller, who gave me a delightful morning, after I had attended his class where the boys came in their black gowns and sat at primitive desks in the low room before a blazing fire, from which one looked out on mouldering walls and dead ivy and the pale morning sun and wan sweet decay, drew a wicked picture of the dons satisfying their thwarted sporting instincts by putting their boys through their intellectual paces and pitting them against each other in scholastic competition like race-horses. Mr. McDougall, large and with an Irish courtliness, I heard and liked, and Mr. L. P. Jacks talked with me at Manchester College. A meeting of the Fabians at St. John’s and a lecture by Mrs. Pember Reeves on “Coöperation” attracted me, with her dramatic flaring out at the stolid audience for their “English” lack of imagination--she came from New Zealand--the inanely facetious comments of the dons, the lumbering discourses of certain beefy burgesses from the local “Coöperative,” who had not followed well the lady’s nimble thought. Every little incident of the Oxford week of classes and rambles fitted into a picture of the place as a perfect epitome of English life, past and present. It was even more than London a world.