from a people, but from a class. Even aristocracy, I think, was not
quite so stoical in the days when it was really strong. But whether
this unemotional ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman, or
only one of the inventions of the modern gentleman (who may be called
the decayed gentleman), it certainly has something to do with the
unemotional quality in these society novels. From representing
aristocrats as people who suppressed their feelings, it has been an
easy step to representing aristocrats as people who had no feelings to
suppress. Thus the modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the
oligarchy of the hardness as well as the brightness of the diamond.
Like a sonneteer addressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he
seems to use the word "cold" almost as a eulogium, and the word
"heartless" as a kind of compliment. Of course, in people so incurably
kind-hearted and babyish as are the English gentry, it would be
impossible to create anything that can be called positive cruelty; so
in these books they exhibit a sort of negative cruelty. They cannot be
cruel in acts, but they can be so in words. All this means one thing,
and one thing only. It means that the living and invigorating ideal of
England must be looked for in the masses; it must be looked for where
Dickens found it--Dickens among whose glories it was to be a humorist,
to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an
Englishman, but the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all
mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did not even notice
the aristocracy; Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he
could not describe a gentleman.

XVI On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant
reasonableness, "If you must make jokes, at least you need not make
them on such serious subjects." I replied with a natural simplicity
and wonder, "About what other subjects can one make jokes except
serious subjects?" It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting.
All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the
sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so
very solemn after all. If a joke is not a joke about religion or
morals, it is a joke about police-magistrates or scientific professors
or undergraduates dressed up as Queen Victoria. And people joke about
the police-magistrate more than they joke abou