The road after Moutier was not a thing for lyrics; it stirred me in no
way. It was bare in the sunlight, had fields on either side; and in
the fields stood houses. In the houses were articulately-speaking
mortal men.
There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them myself) who treat of
common things, and their admirers tell us that these men raise the
things of everyday life to the plane of the supernatural. Note that
phrase, for it is a shaft of light through a cloud revealing their
disgusting minds.
Everyday life! As _La Croix_ said in a famous leading article: _'La
Presse?'_ POOH!' I know that everyday life. It goes with sandals and
pictures of lean ugly people all just like one another in browny
photographs on the wall, and these pictures are called, one 'The House
of Life', or another, 'The Place Beautiful', or yet again a third,
'The Lamp of the Valley', and when you complain and shift about
uneasily before these pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled
owners of them tell you that of course in photographs you lose the
marvellous colour of the original. This everyday life has mantelpieces
made of the same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to
make rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this
life get up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house
slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and
more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to
local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether
this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins
crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no
simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of
that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or
Pietas.