restraint. One may go even further: to be conscious of any restraint is to be guilty of bad manners.
For supposing a severe moralist frown, at a dinner, because the guests, being all intimate, calling each other by familiar nicknames, sit unbracing genially, ladies and all, with their feet on the table. The frown will—and, after all, quite rightly—be set down as a piece of "unsoundness". For, in the first place, what does a moralist—a man with an occupation or a mission—seek in this particular galley? It is—this particular leisured class—circumscribed and walled in; it circumscribes itself, too. It is, as it were, a deer park within London; a Zoological Gardens within the ring of a Regent's park.
If we may call the very poor—the sweated workers—a caput mortuum of the body politic, beyond hope of being raised, beyond hope of being moralized upon because they are always at work: so, in the London of Leisure we may call this other class above hope of being touched, above hope of being moralised upon—because they are always at leisure. It is unprofitable for the moralists to worry about them: they have reverted to savagery, really. Having no work they must needs disport themselves—and the occupation of the idle must necessarily tend towards display. Emulation in display tends, humanity being poor humanity, towards barbarism. (Not towards primitive barbarism, be it said, for that devotes all its energies towards the straitening of its tribal laws, of its moral and ceremonial observances. It veils its women; prescribes fasts;
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