Mr. Britling Sees It Through

a part of the Germanic machine. And that too has its assured end in German national assertion. Here, we have none of those convictions. We know we haven’t finality, and so we are open and apologetic and receptive, rather than wilful.⁠ ⁠… You see all organisation, with its implication of finality, is death. We feel that. The Germans don’t. What you organise you kill. Organised morals or organised religion or organised thought are dead morals and dead religion and dead thought. Yet some organisation you must have. Organisation is like killing cattle. If you do not kill some the herd is just waste. But you musn’t kill all or you kill the herd. The unkilled cattle are the herd, the continuation; the unorganised side of life is the real life. The reality of life is adventure, not performance. What isn’t adventure isn’t life. What can be ruled about can be machined. But priests and schoolmasters and bureaucrats get hold of life and try to make it all rules, all etiquette and regulation and correctitude.⁠ ⁠… And parents and the love of parents make for the same thing. It is all very well to experiment for oneself, but when one sees these dear things of one’s own, so young and inexperienced and so capable of every sort of gallant foolishness, walking along the narrow plank, going down into dark jungles, ah! then it makes one want to wrap them in laws and foresight and fence them about with ‘Verboten’ boards in all the conceivable aspects.⁠ ⁠…”

“In America of course we do set a certain store upon youthful self-reliance,” said Mr. Direck.

“As we do here. It’s in your blood and our blood. It’s the instinct of the English and the Irish anyhow to suspect government and take the risks of the chancy way.⁠ ⁠… And manifestly the Russians, if you read their novelists, have the same twist in them.⁠ ⁠… When we get this young Prussian here, he’s a marvel to us. He really believes in Law. He likes to obey. That seems a sort of joke to us. It’s curious how foreign these Germans are⁠—to all the rest of the world. Because of their docility. Scratch the Russian and you get the Tartar. Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except the German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation⁠—of something beyond organisation.⁠ ⁠…

“It’s one o’clock,” said Mr. Britling abruptly, perceiving a shade of fatigue upon the face of his hearer and realising that his thoughts had taken him too far, “and Sunday. Let’s go to bed.”

§ 11

For a time Mr. Direck could not sleep. His mind had been too excited by this incessant day with all its novelties and all its provocations to comparison. The whole complicated spectacle grouped itself, with a naturalness and a complete want of logic that all who have been young will understand, about Cecily Corner.

She had to be in the picture, and so she came in as though she were the central figure, as though she were the quintessential England. There she was, the type, the blood, the likeness, of no end of Massachusetts families, the very same stuff indeed, and yet she was different.⁠ ⁠…

For a time his thoughts hovered ineffectively about certain details of her ear and cheek, and one may doubt if his interest in these things was entirely international.⁠ ⁠…

Then he found himself under way with an exposition of certain points to Mr. Britling. In the security of his bed he could imagine that he was talking very slowly and carefully while Mr. Britling listened; already he was more than halfway to dreamland or he could not have supposed anything so incredible.

“There’s a curious sort of difference,” he was saying. “It is difficult to define, but on the whole I might express it by saying that such a gathering as this if it was in America would be drawn with harder lines, would show its bones more and have everything more emphatic. And just to take one illustrative point: in America in such a gathering as this there would be bound to be several jokes going on as it were, running jokes and running criticisms, from day to day and from week to week.⁠ ⁠… There would be jokes about your writing and your influence and jokes about Miss Corner’s advanced reading.⁠ ⁠… You see, in America we pay much more attention to personal character. Here people, I notice, are not talked to about their personal characters at all, and many of them do not seem to be aware and do not seem to mind what personal characters they have.⁠ ⁠…

“And another thing I find noteworthy is the way in which what I might call mature people seem to go on having a good time instead of standing by and applauding the young people having a good time.⁠ ⁠… And the young people do not seem to have set out to have a good time at all.⁠ ⁠… Now in America, a charming girl like Miss Corner would be distinctly more aware of herself and her vitality than she is here, distinctly more. Her peculiarly charming sidelong look, if I might make so free with her⁠—would have been called attention to. It’s a perfectly beautiful look, the sort of look some great artist would have loved to make immortal. It’s a look I shall find it hard to forget.⁠ ⁠… But she doesn’t seem to be aware in the least of it. In America she would be aware of it. She would be distinctly aware of it. She would have been made aware of it. She would have been advised of it. It would be looked for and she would know it was looked for. She would give it as a singer gives her most popular song. Mamie Nelson, for example, used to give a peculiar little throw back of the chin and a laugh.⁠ ⁠… It was talked about. People