“You reply, ‘What is all this fuss about? I have done the best for myself.—I was not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly and quietly, cultivating my vegetable ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies.—I do no harm to anybody.’”
“That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray—What is your position?—You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a programme of manners. For four years you trained with other recruits. You are now a perfectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is as observed in an average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist.—Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde decade, are a stronger body. The Chelsea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the dregs of Anglo-Saxon civilization!—There is nothing softer on earth.—Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nineties, the wardrobe—leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its head-quarters in Chelsea!
“You are concentrated, systematic slop.—There is nothing in the universe to be said for you.—Any efficient State would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe, that old hat, and the rest, as infecte and insanitary, and prohibit you from propagating.”
Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun.—His bowler hat bobbed and out clean lines as he spoke.
“A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe.—They make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in the neighbourhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual.—You are not an individual. You have, I repeat, no right to that hair and that hat. You are trying to have the apple and eat it too.—You should be in uniform, and at work, not uniformly out of uniform, and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?”
Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely on Hobson; in an abrupt and disconnected voice he asked his question.
Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair. He yawned a little. He replied:
“Am I idle, did you say? Yes, I suppose I am not particularly industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all that nonsense. Vous vous moquez de moi! Where are you coming to?”
“I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle. You go to seed.—The only justification for your slovenly appearance, it is true, is that it is ideally emblematic.”
“My dear Tarr, you’re a strange fellow. I can’t see why these things should occupy you.—You have just told me a lot of things that may be true or may not. But at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—quoi? one asks. You contradict yourself. You know you don’t think what you talk. You deafen me with your upside-downness.”