A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them everywhere; they wave their arms at us around the world, they puff their white breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up in a row before the great cities, before the mighty-hearted nations, and say it again and again, all in chorus, "We have served you, now, you serve us!"
It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives.
But why should we serve them?
I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands.
And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be serious.
And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky, beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid. Every now and then perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and run back again. Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself, tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of gentlemanly disappointment.
And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious.
When Oxford with its hundred spires, its little beautiful boy choirs of professors, draws me one side from the Great Western Railway Station, and intones in those still, solemn, lonely spaces the great truth in my ears, that machines and ideals cannot go together, that the only way to deal with ideals is to keep them away from machines, my only reply is that ideals that are so tired that they are merely devoted to defending themselves, ideals that will not and cannot go forth and be the breath of the machines, ideals that cannot and will not master the machines, that will not ride the machines as the wind, overrun matter, and conquer the earth, are not ideals for gentlemen.
At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford gentleman.
A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and noblest self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body. He makes the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the movements of his feet and his hands. He gathers up his rooms into his will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full meaning of his soul. He makes all these things say him.