ng terms. I
asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had
joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but
yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding
substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off
slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious
as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand
that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore
resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern
Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

The Red Town

When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid,
there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The most
obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the
nose. But if you have scruples (moral or physical) about this course,
you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this case has all the savage
solidity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say that "most people"
are stupid. It is like saying "most people are tall," when it is obvious
that "tall" can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to
denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.

Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic,
and should he still remain cold, a third course opens: lead him by the
hand (himself half-willing) towards some sunlit and yet secret meadow
and ask him who made the names of the common wild flowers. They were
ordinary people, so far as any one knows, who gave to one flower the
name of the Star of Bethlehem and to another and much commoner flower
the tremendous title of the Eye of Day. If you cling to the snobbish
notion that common people are prosaic, ask any common person for the
local names of the flowers, names which vary not only from county to
county, but even from dale to dale.

But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this. It will be
said that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and that
the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it. For some
extraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London slang is
full of witty things said by nobody in particular. True, the creed
of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed of the old
countryside; but the people are just as clever in giving names to their
sins in the city as in