e to feel that optimism was just where it always had been and
everything all right and very bright with him and with the world about
him. He did not go under without a struggle. But as Max Beerbohm's
caricature--the 1908 one I mean--brought out all too plainly, there was
in his very animation, something of the alert liveliness of the hunted
man. Do what he would he had a terrible irrational feeling that things,
as yet scarce imagined things, were after him and would have him. Even
as he makes his point, even as he gesticulates airily, with his rather
distinctively North European nose Beerbohmically enlarged and his
sensitive nostril in the air, he seems to be looking at something he
does not want to look at, something conceivably pursuing, out of the
corner of his eye.

The thing that was assailing Mr. Brumley and making his old established
humour and tenderness seem dull and opaque and giving this new uneasy
quality to his expression was of course precisely the thing that Sir
Isaac meant when he talked about "idees" and their disturbing influence
upon all the once assured tranquillities and predominances of Putney
life. It was criticism breaking bounds.

As a basis and substance for the tissue of whimsically expressed
happiness and confident appreciation of the good things of life, which
Mr. Brumley had set before himself as his agreeable--and it was to be
hoped popular and profitable--life-task, certain assumptions had been
necessary. They were assumptions he had been very willing to make and
which were being made in the most exemplary way by the writers who were
succeeding all about him at the commencement of his career. And these
assumptions had had such an air then of being quite trustworthy, as
being certain to wash and wear! Already nowadays it is difficult to get
them stated; they have become incredible while still too near to justify
the incredibility that attaches to history. It was assumed, for example,
that in the institutions, customs and culture of the middle Victorian
period, humanity had, so far as the broad lines of things are concerned,
achieved its goal. There were of course still bad men and
women--individually--and classes one had to recognize as "lower," but
all the main things were right, general ideas were right; the law was
right, institutions were right, Consols and British Railway Debentures
were right and were going to keep right for ever. The Abolition of
Slavery in America had been the las