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BEFORE THE WAR 253
with Beardsleyesque - Brunelleschi drawings
and felt, quite rightly, that it was rather nasty.
The heart of England was sound. All over
the country were homes in which ladies were
permitted neither to smoke cigarettes nor read
the plays of Ibsen nor pronounce, without a
shudder, the name of Mr. Lloyd George. By
the majority the use of cosmetics was still
reckoned a sin, Wagner a good joke, and
The Spectator was still
Kipling a good poet.
read. Nevertheless, the student of paulo-prewar
England will have to recognize that for a
few delirious years a part of the ruling faction
and some of the
cosmopolitan plutocrats
brisker peeresses listened more willingly to
the clever than to the good. There was a
veneer of culture or, as I have hinted, of
intellectual snobisme.
delude those whom it wills to
Heaven may
destroy, but the very infirmities of its favourites
it shapes to their proper advantage. The
governing classes of Europe effectually upset
the apple-carts of their fanciful friends by
getting into a war. When that happened these
dream-pedlars surely should have perceived
that the game was up. They had always
known that only by devoting its first half to
the accumulation of wealth and culture could
the twentieth century hope in its second to
make good some part of its utopic vision.