Idealism; United States -- Social life and customs
unworthy of a sensible man's regard everything but honesty, reading,
spelling and arithmetic (add, in the case of Howard Vincent, a dash of
accomplishments and agnostic philosophy), Worcestershire sauce and
jests of custom-made humor. Blessed be humor. The man or woman without
it is like a loaf of stale bread or a cup of brackish water. But to be
content with the mere workaday world and its ways is like travelling
perpetually with a grip-sack. When we open the grip-sack, what do we
find? The barest necessaries of life, without a trace of anything
which inspires or refines. I have no desire to betray the private
affairs of any commercial traveller, or to imply that the Bible and
Shakespeare are not occasionally to be found both in the kit of the
travelling man and the English leather trunk of the more elegant man
of fashion. I am simply cautioning you, my male correspondents, to
beware of accepting as final your world as you find it. Nothing is
more sure to make you a second-class person. Mere good-natured
common-sense ("horse-sense," as our drummer would call it) is a useful
virtue, but it would keep civilization ordinary to the crack of doom.
Ah! now we are likely to have trouble. Notice, please, the lady coming
this way. How graceful and elegant she is. A delicate, refined face
and bearing. See how she sidles off from the third and second-class
passengers with an expression of distaste for them which suggests
pain. She cannot bear coarse people. She believes herself to be an
intellectual woman with serious tastes. She aims to be a spiritual
person and she reads many essays--by Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Pater,
and others. She is fond of history and politics; not of this country,
because she claims that it is vulgar and lacks picturesqueness. But
she can tell you all about the governments of Europe, and who is prime
minister of or in authority in each of them. Democracy does not
interest her. It seems to her to concern the affairs of dirty or
common people; and she cares nothing for the great social questions of
the age. They appear to her to clash with personal spirituality and
culture. She is very sensitive. She has made a study of music,
especially Wagner. She is very particular as to what she has to eat,
but the grossness of men, as she calls it, offends her seriously. She
believes herself to be not very strong physically, and she is nervous
on the subject of arsenic in wall-papers and germs in drinking-water.
She has retained her maidenly instincts to the last.
What is that you ask, madam? A seat in a first-class carriage. Excuse
me, you cannot go in there. You belong in the second-class section of
the train. Mistake? There is no mistake. I understand perfectly. I'm
ready to take your word for it that you have read Dante in the
original, and I know that you are
_Chaste as the icicle
That's curded by the frost from purest snow,
And hangs on Dian's temple._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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