own a
hill. It is distinctly more stirring, say, than a glacier, which moves
an inch in a hundred years. But I do not divide these pleasures either
by excitement or convenience, but by the nature of the thing itself. It
seems human to have a horse or bicycle, because it seems human to potter
about; and men cannot work horses, nor can bicycles work men, enormously
far afield of their ordinary haunts and affairs.

But about motoring there is something magical, like going to the moon;
and I say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as something
breathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse, but would
have the moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound
guidebooks to life; I like the Fairy Prince to ride on a white pony
out of his father's stables, which are of ivory and gold. But if in the
course of his adventures he finds it necessary to travel on a flaming
dragon, I think he ought to give the dragon back to the witch at the end
of the story. It is a mistake to have dragons about the place.

For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury; and it is by
this that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. All
romances that deal in extreme luxury, from the "Arabian Nights" to the
novels of Ouida and Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air of
dream and occasionally of nightmare. In such imaginative debauches there
is something as occasional as intoxication; if that is still counted
occasional. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony of
dullness; it is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flying
vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavour and fierce
colour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which is
speed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at the head of
an armed mob, "I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures, if
you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange and
alien energies of science, if you feel them strange and alien, and not
your own. But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth Section of the
Eighth Decree of the Republic) to hire a motor-car twice a year at
Margate, I am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, the protector
of them."

That is what I should say to the duke. As to what the duke would say to
me, that is another matter, and may well be deferred.

The Triumph of the Donkey

Doubtless the unsympathetic might s