status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some such
trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well for
us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all our
statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of a
trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers
of a dull civilization were to be called out of their houses and their
holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strange
sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of what
nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the
darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in
France and Flanders who called out "Early Doors!" themselves in a
theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down
the doors of death.

XVII

THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN

The only way to write a popular history, as we have already remarked,
would be to write it backwards. It would be to take common objects of
our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the
street at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient to
take two objects we have known all our lives, as features of fashion or
respectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a
top-hat; the other, which is still a customary formality, is a pair of
trousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue
to what has happened in England for the last hundred years. It is not
necessary to be an aesthete in order to regard both objects as the
reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational side
of beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can the
lines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first and
too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to
see that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a
hat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top-heavy.
But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects,
which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally
conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them
casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at least
rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism,
and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearing
knee-breec