“Very philosophical song that,” said Dalroy, shaking his head solemnly, “full of deep thought. I really think that is about the truth of the matter, in the case of the Englishman. Your enemies say you’re stupid, and you boast of being illogical–which is about the only thing you do that really is stupid. As if anybody ever made an Empire or anything else by saying that two and two make five. Or as if anyone was ever the stronger for not understanding anything–if it were only tip-cat or chemistry. But this is true about you Hump. You English are supremely an artistic people, and therefore you go by associations, as I said in my song. You won’t have one thing without the other thing that goes with it. And as you can’t imagine a village without a squire and parson, or a college without port and old oak, you get the reputation of a Conservative people. But it’s because you’re sensitive, Hump, not because you’re stupid, that you won’t part with things. It’s lies, lies and flattery they tell you, Hump, when they tell you you’re fond of compromise. I tell ye, Hump, every real revolution is a compromise. D’ye think Wolfe Tone or Charles Stuart Parnell never compromised? But it’s just because you’re afraid of a compromise that you won’t have a revolution. If you really overhauled ‘The Old Ship’–or Oxford–you’d have to make up your mind what to take and what to leave, and it would break your heart, Humphrey Pump.”
He stared in front of him with a red and ruminant face, and at length added, somewhat more gloomily,
“This aesthetic way we have, Hump, has only two little disadvantages which I will now explain to you. The first is exactly what has sent us flying in this contraption. When the beautiful, smooth, harmonious thing you’ve made is worked by a new type, in a new spirit, then I tell you it would be better for you a thousand times to be living under the thousand paper constitutions of Condorcet and Sieyes. When the English oligarchy is run by an Englishman who hasn’t got an English mind–then you have Lord Ivywood and all this nightmare, of which God could only guess the end.”
The car had beaten some roods of dust behind it, and he ended still more darkly:
“And the other disadvantage, my amiable aesthete, is this. If ever, in blundering about the planet, you come on an island in the Atlantic–Atlantis, let us say–which won’t accept all your pretty picture–to which you can’t give everything– why you will probably decide to give nothing. You will say in your hearts: ‘Perhaps they will starve soon’; and you will become, for that island, the deafest and the most evil of all the princes of the earth.”
It was already daybreak, and Pump, who knew the English boundaries almost by intuition, could tell even through the twilight that the tail of the little town they were leaving behind was of a new sort, the sort to be seen in the western border. The chauffeur’s phrase about his mother might merely have been a music-hall joke; but certainly he had driven darkly in that direction.
White morning lay about the grey stony streets like spilt milk. A few proletarian early risers, wearier at morning than most men at night, seemed merely of opinion that it was no use crying over it. The two or three last houses, which looked almost too tired to stand upright, seemed to have moved the Captain into another sleepy explosion.
“There are two kinds of idealists, as everybody knows–or must have thought of. There are those who idealize the real and those who (precious seldom) realise the ideal. Artistic and poetical people like the English generally idealize the real. This I have expressed in a song, which–”
“No, really,” protested the innkeeper, “really now, Captain–”
“This I have expressed in a song,” repeated Dalroy, in an adamantine manner, “which I will now sing with every circumstance of leisure, loudness, or any other–”