My vocations led me to travel almost daily on one of the Great Eastern
lines—the Woodford Branch. Every one knows that Müller perpetrated his
detestable act on the North London Railway, close by. The English middle
class, of which I am myself a feeble unit, travel on the Woodford branch
in large numbers. Well, the demoralization of our class,—which (the
newspapers are constantly saying it, so I may repeat it without vanity)
has done all the great things which have ever been done in England,—the
demoralization of our class caused, I say, by the Bow tragedy, was
something bewildering. Myself a transcendentalist (as the _Saturday
Review_ knows), I escaped the infection; and day after day I used to ply
my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my
transcendentalism and my turn for French would naturally suggest to me.
I reminded them how Julius Cæsar refused to take precautions against
assassination, because life was not worth having at the price of an
ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what insignificant atoms we
all are in the life of the world. Suppose the worse to happen, I said,
addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside,—suppose even yourself to be
the victim, _il n’y a pas d’homme nécessaire_. We should miss you for a
day or two on the Woodford Branch; but the great mundane movement would
still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled,
dividends would still be paid at the bank, omnibuses would still run,
there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch street.
All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate in the bosom of the great
English middle class their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty
clinging to life.
—Matthew Arnold’s _Essays in Criticism_.