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BEFORE THE WAR 251
essence of society, and you can no more have
wit that hurts nothing Queen Victoria respected
than you can have truth that hurts nothing
she believed. Now wit is purely an affair of
the intellect, and so is society when it is at
all good ; no one but a fool dreams of going
there for fine feelings and profound emotions.
But the intellect to be nimble must be free :
'tis a sprite will play you the prettiest tricks
an you give it the run of the house ; close but
one door though, and it sits sulking in the
lobby. Delightful are the games it can play
you : wit, irony, criticism, thrilling ideas,
visions of fantastic anarchy and breathless
generalizations all these it can give ; but the
earth and all things above and below must be
its toy-box ; from the deferential intellect
expect nothing better than puns, anecdotes,
comfortable platitudes, elaborate facetiousness,
and the Saturday Westminster.
I do not suggest that in the spring of 1914
English society was brilliant or anything of
that sort : I think it was tired of being merely
decent. One or two fine ladies had made
open-mindedness and a taste for ideas fashion-
able : snobisme was doing the rest. And we
may as well recognize, without more ado, that,
Athens and Florence being things of the past,
a thick-spread intellectual and artistic snobisme
is the only possible basis for a modern civiliza-