The

habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The

English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the

races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave heavy

dinner-parties, they wrote letters to the Times, and ignored an

outside world beyond their island. Their estimate of themselves and of

foreigners remained unaltered, their estimate of rich or influential

neighbours was what it always had been, there were many more motor-cars

and a few more peers, it was more difficult than formerly to get into a

good club; but otherwise, God bless them, they were worthier than ever.

The “dear old country,” that which “out there” we had loved and

venerated, worked and fought for, was stolid and unshaken; the stream

of advancing life that elsewhere rushed, had left England complaisantly

unmoved and unresponsive.

You have no idea how vividly—and in what curious minor details—the

general note of England strikes a traveller returning after an interval

of years. Later, of course, the single impression is modified and

obscured by other feelings. I give it, therefore, before it was

forgotten. England had not budged. Had it been winter instead of early

spring, I might sum up for you what I mean in one short sentence: I

travelled to London in a third-class railway carriage that had no

heating apparatus.

But to all this, and with a touch of something akin to pride in me,

I speedily adjusted myself. I had been exiled, I had come home. As our

old nurse, aged and withered, but otherwise unaltered, said to me

quietly by way of greeting: “Well, they didn’t kill you, Master

Richard!” I was, therefore, alive. It was for me, the unimportant atom,

to recover my place in the parent mass. I did so. I was English. I

recovered proportion. I wore the accustomed mask; I hid both my person

and my new emotions, as was obviously expected of me. Having reported

my insignificance to the Foreign Office…. I came down to the Manor

House.

Yet, having changed, and knowing that I had changed, I was aware of

a cleft between me and my native stock. Something un-English was alive

in me and eager to assert itself. Another essence in my blood had

quickened, a secret yearning that I dared not mention to my kind, a new

hunger in my heart that clamoured to be satisfied, yet remained,

speaking generally, un-nourished. Looking for beauty among my

surroundings and among my kith and kin, I found it not; there was no

great Thrill from England or from home. The slowness, the absence of

colour, imagination, rhythm, baffled me, while the ugliness of common

things and common usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I am

peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception—I am no

artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression—but that a

certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative

veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even

tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so proud

to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, not a leader,

far less a prophet. There was no imagination.

In little things, as I said, a change was manifest, however. Much

that tradition had made lovely with the perfume of many centuries I

found modernized until the ancient spirit had entirely fled, leaving a

shell that was artificial to the point of being false. The sanction of

olden time that used to haunt with beauty was deceived by a mockery I

found almost hideous. The ancient inns, for instance, adapted to

week-end motor traffic, were pretentious and uncomfortable, their

“menus” of inferior food written elaborately in French. The courtliness

had vanished, and the cost had come.