hus enslaved to his conditions? Is he to be tossed
hither and thither by changes which he did not create, by ideas to
which he did not subscribe, by a tempest he never wished to combat? Is
there no quiet place of refuge wherein he may be at peace to live as
his ancestors lived, and to cherish the humble ambitions which they
cherished? The answer, in a certain sense, is "No." The conventions
which served their purpose have in many cases lost their meaning; the
duties our ancestors performed have lost their usefulness; the old
bottles will not hold the new wine which our generation serves to us.
And this is one reason why so many people rate and gibe at what they
call the "muddle-headed British public; "because it cannot change its
ideas so quickly as it is forced to change its conditions of life.

But is there not an important significance in the very fact which
makes our intellectuals desperate with indignation, the fact that you
cannot change the "public mind" so rapidly as you can change its
tramway services, its government, or the place--the cellar, the crust
of the earth, or the sky--in which it is to be housed? It is easier to
take a man up in an aeroplane than it is to make him agree that his
neighbour ought to run away with his wife, or that his sons ought not
to read Thucydides. Even amongst those writers whom I have named there
is beginning to arise a half-formed consciousness that amid all these
changes in circumstances we must be careful how we admit changes in
character and in mental calibre; a consciousness that we are in need
of some fixed point by which the world may be enabled to retain its
sanity. Now there are two classes of people who believe in permanence:
those who think that the world is the same always because they are too
silly to open their eyes; and the very small class of those who have
felt profoundly that all things are changing in something more than
the Heraclitean sense, who have yet penetrated to the necessity of a
permanence, of an organic human continuity, underlying the multiplex
circumstances and ideas of our life.

And this brings me back to Mr. Forster and Mr. Galsworthy. "Howard's
End," the old-fashioned house which gives its name to Mr. Forster's
novel, is contrasted with the new buildings which are occupied and
vacated, which spring up on all sides and are vicariously inhabited,
which draw nearer and nearer to the garden and the wych-elm of
"Howard's End." It is the symbol of p