“I should have thought precisely the contrary,” he would probably say, being a lunatic.
The lunatic having been allowed to depart, I should like to ask the Smiths—middle-aged Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith—a question somewhat in these terms: “What is the uppermost, the most frequent feeling in your minds about this community which you call ‘home’? You needn’t tell me that you love it, that it is the dearest place on earth, that no other place could ever have quite the same, etc., etc. I know all about that. I admit it. Is not your uppermost, commonest feeling a feeling that it is rather a tedious, tiresome place, and that the human components of it are excellent persons, but. . . and that really you have had a great deal to put up with?”
In reply, do not be sentimental, be honest.. . .
Such being your impression of home (not your deepest, but your most obvious impression), can it fairly be stated that the home of the Smiths is a success?
There are two traits which have prevented the home of the Smiths from being a complete success, from being that success which both Mr. and Mrs. Smith fully intended to achieve when they started, and which young John and young Mary fully intend to achieve when they at length start without having decided precisely how they will do better than their elders. The first is British independence of action, which causes the owner of a British temperament to seek to combine the advantages of anarchical solitude with the advantages of a community: impossible feat! In the home of the Smiths each room is a separate Norman fortress, sheltering an individuality that will be untrammelled or perish.
And the second is the unchangeable conviction at the bottom of every Briton’s heart that formal politeness in intimacy is insincere. This is especially true of the Midlands and the North. When I left the Midlands and went South, I truly thought, for several days, that Southerners were a hypocritical lot, just because they said, “If you wouldn’t mind moving,” instead of “Now, then, out of it!” Gruffness and the malicious satisfaction of candid gratuitous criticism are the root of the evil in the home of the Smiths. And the consequences of them are very much more serious than the Smiths in their gruffness imagine.