experiences really
record their lack of experiences. It is the countryman who has not
succeeded in being a countryman who comes up to London. It is the
clerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries (on vegetarian
principles) to be a countryman. And the woman with a past is generally a
woman angry about the past she never had.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and
love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really
been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them
back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because
we have drunk them dry.

THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL

I have republished all these old articles of mine because they cover
a very controversial period, in which I was in nearly all the
controversies, whether I was visible there or no. And I wish to gather
up into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things;
and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace—or in
other words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls; a noble and much-needed
work. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism for
the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last
roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly
irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like
the Ten Commandments. I would call it "Don'ts for Dogmatists; or Things
I am Tired Of."

This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, would
begin with superficial things; but there would be, I fancy, a wailing
imprecation in the words that could not be called artificial; it might
begin thus:—

(1) Don't use a noun and then an adjective that crosses out the noun.
An adjective qualifies, it cannot contradict. Don't say, "Give me a
patriotism that is free from all boundaries." It is like saying, "Give
me a pork pie with no pork in it." Don't say, "I look forward to that
larger religion that shall have no special dogmas." It is like saying,
"I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet." A
quadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means something
that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe. Don't let
the meek substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful, exuberant
adjective.

(2) Don't say you are not going to say a thing, and then say it. This
practice is very flourishing and succes