[1 Apr ’09]

I should like to assume that all enlightened and curious readers have already perused this book and its forerunner, “The Bettesworth Book” (Lamley and Co.), of which a cheap edition is soon to be had.  But my irritating mania for stopping facts in the street and gazing at them makes it impossible for me to assume any such thing.  I am perfectly certain that to about 70 per cent. of you the name of George Bourne means naught.  I therefore need not apologize for offering the information that these books are books.  They set forth the psychology and the everything else of the backbone, foundation, and original stock of the English race.  They deal with England.  Naturally, the sacred name of England will call up in your mind visions of the Carlton Club, Blenheim, Regent Street, Tubes, Selfridge’s, theatre stalls, the crowd at Lord’s, and the brilliant writers of the New Age.  And these phenomena are a part of England; but I tell you that they are all only the froth on the surface of Bettesworth the labourer.  If you regard this as a cryptic saying, read the two books, and you will see light.

SWINBURNE

[Sidenote:_22 Apr. ’09_]

On Good Friday night I was out in the High Street, at the cross-roads, where the warp and the woof of the traffic assault each other under a great glare of lamps.  The shops were closed and black, except where a tobacconist kept the tobacconist’s bright and everlasting vigil; but above the shops occasional rare windows were illuminated, giving hints—­dressing-tables, pictures, gas-globes—­of intimate private lives.  I don’t know why such hints should always seem to me pathetic, saddening; but they do.  And beneath them, through the dark defile of shutters, motor-omnibuses roared and swayed and curved, too big for the street, and dwarfing it.  And automobiles threaded between them, and bicycles dared the spaces that were left.  From afar off there came a flying light, like a shot out of a gun, and it grew into a man perched on a shuddering contrivance that might have been invented by H.G.  Wells, and swept perilously into the contending currents, and by miracles emerged untouched, and was gone, driven by the desire of the immortal soul within the man.  This strange thing happened again and again.  The pavements were crowded with hurrying or loitering souls, and the omnibuses and autos were full of them:  hundreds passed before the vision every moment.  And they were all preoccupied; they nearly all bore the weary, egotistic melancholy that spreads like an infection at the close of a fete day in London; the lights of a motor-omnibus would show the rapt faces of sixteen souls at once in their glass cage, driving the vehicle on by their desires.  The policeman and the loafers in the ring of fire made by the public-houses at the cross-roads—­even these were grave with the universal affliction of life, and grim with the relentless universal egotism.