tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is
still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of
this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is
fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really
fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is
exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He
can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the
people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because
for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares
at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to
flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals--of free
men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The
street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and
quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These
creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put
their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual
competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles
and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do
seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine
sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman
at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The
vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the
major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke.
The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they
will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really
mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbours did
not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their
rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean
when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much
deeper. We do not dislike them because they have so little force and
fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them
because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in
us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the
narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it.
And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character.
They are not aversions t