Download File

248
BEFORE THE WAR
ideas that in time might have been turned to
account. That is where the Edwardian-
good
Georgian age differed most hopefully from the
Victorian. In Victorian days when a man
became rich or ceased to be miserably poor he
still found himself in a society where moneymaking
was considered the proper end of
he was still in the
existence : intellectually
slums. In the spring of 1914 society offered
the new-comer precisely what the new-comer
wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas,
still less a
perfect civilization, but an intellectual flutter,
faint and feverish no doubt, a certain receptivity
to new ways of thinking and feeling, a
mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance
of inherited wealth. Not, I suppose, since
1789 have days seemed more full of promise
than those spring days of 1914. They seem
fabulous now, and a fairy-tale never comes
amiss.
The generation that takes its first look at
the world in the years that follow the war will
hardly be persuaded that in the years that
just preceded it the governing class was drift-
out of barbarism. Yet so it was. The
ing
brighter and better educated, at any rate, were
beginning to discover that clever people are
more entertaining than stupid ones, and that
social experiment is as good an extravagance
as another. England was fantastically rich ;