should catch myself out, and stretch my
hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how
instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any
other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original
to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It
is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the
image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest
depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person
which is seen by other people--what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent
world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in
omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that
accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And
the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of
these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an
almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those
the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more
and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as
the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps--but these generalizations are
very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls
leading articles, cabinet ministers--a whole class of things indeed
which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the
real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless
damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday
afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the
dead, clothes, and habits--like the habit of sitting all together in one
room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule
for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was
that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments
marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in
the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were
not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to
discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks,
country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half
phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was
only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those
things I wonder, those real