This I could not remember, but I told him I did not see why he
should remove one of the best things in the book. But my assurances that
the pun was excellent did not seem to tranquillise him. Now, why should
not a philosopher make a pun? Shakespeare was an incorrigible punster.
Why should a man's life be divided into little artificial sections, like
the labelled heads in the phrenologist's window? I do not want to see a
man put on his Sunday clothes to talk about religion. But a congenital
inelasticity is fostered in the atmosphere of common-rooms, there where
solemn-footed serving-men present the port with sacerdotal ceremonies,
and where, if the dons are no longer (in the classic phrase of Gibbon)
"sunk in port and superstition," the port is still a superstition. This
absence of humour, this superhuman seriousness bred of heavy traditions
peculiarly English, this sobriety nourished by sacerdotal port, give the
victim quite a wrong sense of values and proportions. He mistakes
University for Universe. His tastes become the measure of a creation of
which he is the centre. Hence an abiding gravity that is ever on the
brink of dulness. The Englishman cannot afford to be grave, the bore is
so close at hand.
And yet, if one did not take oneself seriously, I suppose nothing would
ever be done.
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