“The idea that Smith is attacking is this.  Living in an entangled civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not wrong at all.  We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong.  In themselves they are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable.  There is nothing wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not mean to hit him and know you won’t.  It is no more wrong than throwing a pebble at the sea—­less, for you do occasionally hit the sea.  There is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking through a roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or property of other men.  It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from the top than to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom.  There is nothing wicked about walking round the world and coming back to your own house; it is no more wicked than walking round the garden and coming back to your own house.  And there is nothing wicked about picking up your wife here, there, and everywhere, if, forsaking all others, you keep only to her so long as you both shall live.  It is as innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.  You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being seen going) into a pawnbroker’s or a public-house.  You think there is something squalid and commonplace about such a connection.  You are mistaken.

“This man’s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed.  He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.  It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell, and you found that he only played for trouser buttons.  It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it was his grandmother.  Everything is ugly and discreditable, except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that he has done no wrong.

“It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?’ To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive.  He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all.  And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it is one that will not be approved.