to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives.

But why should we serve them?

I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume
and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands.

And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be
serious.

And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky,
beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid. Every now and then
perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and
run back again. Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself,
tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of
gentlemanly disappointment.

And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious.

When Oxford with its hundred spires, its little beautiful boy choirs of
professors, draws me one side from the Great Western Railway Station,
and intones in those still, solemn, lonely spaces the great truth in my
ears, that machines and ideals cannot go together, that the only way to
deal with ideals is to keep them away from machines, my only reply is
that ideals that are so tired that they are merely devoted to defending
themselves, ideals that will not and cannot go forth and be the breath
of the machines, ideals that cannot and will not master the machines,
that will not ride the machines as the wind, overrun matter, and conquer
the earth, are not ideals for gentlemen.

At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford
gentleman.

A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and noblest
self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body. He makes
the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the
movements of his feet and his hands. He gathers up his rooms into his
will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full
meaning of his soul. He makes all these things say him.

The main attribute of a man who is not a gentleman is that he does not
do these things, that he cannot inform his body with his spirit.

I go back to the Great Western Railway, ugly as it still is. I go alone,
and sadly if I must, and for a little time--without the deep bells and
without the stained-glass windows, without all that dear, familiar
beauty I have loved in the old and quiet quadrangles--I take my stand
beside the Great Western Railway! I claim the Great Western Railway for
the spirit of man and for the will of Go