is migration has landed him. On these points Hector is not
quite convinced: he still thinks that the British are apt to make merits
of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as
points of good breeding. English life seems to him to suffer from a lack
of edifying rhetoric (which he calls moral tone); English behavior to
show a want of respect for womanhood; English pronunciation to fail
very vulgarly in tackling such words as world, girl, bird, etc.; English
society to be plain spoken to an extent which stretches occasionally to
intolerable coarseness; and English intercourse to need enlivening by
games and stories and other pastimes; so he does not feel called upon to
acquire these defects after taking great paths to cultivate himself in a
first rate manner before venturing across the Atlantic. To this culture
he finds English people either totally indifferent as they very commonly
are to all culture, or else politely evasive, the truth being that
Hector's culture is nothing but a state of saturation with our literary
exports of thirty years ago, reimported by him to be unpacked at a
moment's notice and hurled at the head of English literature, science
and art, at every conversational opportunity. The dismay set up by
these sallies encourages him in his belief that he is helping to educate
England. When he finds people chattering harmlessly about Anatole France
and Nietzsche, he devastates them with Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table, and even Macaulay; and as he is devoutly religious
at bottom, he first leads the unwary, by humorous irreverences, to wave
popular theology out of account in discussing moral questions with him,
and then scatters them in confusion by demanding whether the carrying
out of his ideals of conduct was not the manifest object of God Almighty
in creating honest men and pure women. The engaging freshness of his
personality and the dumbfoundering staleness of his culture make it
extremely difficult to decide whether he is worth knowing; for
whilst his company is undeniably pleasant and enlivening, there is
intellectually nothing new to be got out of him, especially as he
despises politics, and is careful not to talk commercial shop, in which
department he is probably much in advance of his English capitalist
friends. He gets on best with romantic Christians of the amoristic sect:
hence the friendship which has sprung up between him and Octavius.

In appearance