And
there should be lots of money for everybody, and any amount of laughter
and gaiety, and I would give dances twice a volume, and see that all the
girls had partners, delightful waltzers with good conversation. And there
would be garden-parties (weather permitting invariably), and picnics
without green spiders, and sails without sea-sickness. And as for truth
and realism--fie on them! We can create a much nicer world than nature's.
Why be plagiarists, when we can make universes of our own?
VI
CONCERNING GENERAL ELECTIONS
Twice in succession has it befallen me to be privately busy in a
backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great
bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter
at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks
homing at twilight, as though the course of Nature were still the same,
and to see the moonlight rippling over the sombre water at midnight in
unaffected tranquillity. Myself was scarcely better informed of the tidal
flood: stray echoes of speech, odd fragments of newspaper floated down to
me, and at intervals some visitant from the greater deep held, like a
sea-shell, the rumour of its sounding waters.
And, indeed, where shall we find a better metaphor for party-government
than this of the tide, of the ebb and flow of political
power--remorseless, inevitable, regardless of those who, tossed high on
the stream, imagine they direct it? And in this metaphor the People must
play Moon, like the clown in "A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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