The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and
exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly
judged. They do not talk of the things that are really active in
their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to
be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex
and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to
me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties
and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of
passionate interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields,
or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a
novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . .

It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the
great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we
are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the
greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future
that is possible to us. London is the most interesting, beautiful,
and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental
and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant
totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old
bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the
scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in
comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my
imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at
hand.

It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I
think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London
night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which