uts,
got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial
affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared
and said, "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just
as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and
professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays
fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music,
art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same
utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could
write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social
opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and
newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their
activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They
did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to
realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when
they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing
to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety
theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined
by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our
society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an
economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as
Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with
all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its
best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For
prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.

Horseback Hall

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative
to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for
horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted
them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths
of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity,
churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative
electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two
establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the
music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the
stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
first