“Talking of Bars,” said Chelifer, as they sat down at a little table in front of the café, “has it ever occurred to you to enumerate the English words that have come to have an international currency? It’s a somewhat curious selection, and one which seems to me to throw a certain light on the nature and significance of our Anglo-Saxon civilisation. The three words from Shakespeare’s language that have a completely universal currency are Bar, Sport and W.C. They’re all just as good Finnish now as they are good English. Each of these words possesses what I may call a family. Round the idea ‘Bar’ group themselves various other international words, such as Bitter, Cocktail, Whiskey and the like. ‘Sport’ boasts a large family—Match, for example, Touring Club, the verb to Box, Cycle-Car, Performance (in the sporting sense) and various others. The idea of hydraulic sanitation has only one child that I can think of, namely, Tub. Tub—it has a strangely old-world sound in English nowadays; but in Yugo-Slavia, on the other hand, it is exceedingly up-to-date. Which leads us on to that very odd class of international English words that have never been good English at all. A Smoking for example, a Dancing, a Five-o’clock—these have never existed except on the continent of Europe. As for High-Life, so popular a word in Athens, where it is spelt iota, gamma, lambda, iota, phi—that dates from a remote, mid-Victorian epoch in the history of our national culture.” “And Spleen,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget Spleen. That comes from much further back. A fine aristocratic word, that; we were fools to allow it to become extinct. One has to go to France to hear it uttered now.” “The word may be dead,” said Chelifer, “but the emotion, I fancy, has never flourished more luxuriantly than now. The more material progress, the more wealth and leisure, the more standardised amusements—the more boredom. It’s inevitable, it’s the law of Nature. The people who have always suffered from spleen and who are still the principal victims, are the prosperous, leisured and educated. At present they form a relatively small minority; but in the Utopian state where everybody is well off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen. In this way, it may be, natural selection will work towards the evolution of the super-man. Only the intelligent will be able to bear the almost intolerable burden of leisure and prosperity. The rest will simply wither away, or cut their throats—or, perhaps more probably, return in desperation to the delights of barbarism and cut one another’s throats, not to mention the throats of the intelligent.”