climbing the Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to
imagine the thing done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he
is a bad one. But at the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is
usually nothing more material than an oafish smirk at some
disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping of shins under the table. Let any
woman who is disquieted by reports of her husband's derelictions
figure to herself how long it would have taken him to propose
to her if left to his own enterprise, and then let her ask herself if so
pusillanimous a creature could be imaged in the role of Don Giovanni.


Finally, there is his conscience--the accumulated sediment of
ancestral faintheartedness in countless generations, with vague
religious fears and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a
conscience? Yes, dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may
be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brummagem. It may be
indistinguishable, at times, from the mere fear that someone may be
looking. It may be shot through with hypocrisy, stupidity,
play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences go in Christendom, it
is genuinely entitled to the name--and it is always in action. A man,
remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit and slave of the
environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the House of
Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons without
becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard
without shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern
university without carrying away scars. And by the same token one
cannot live and have one's being in a modern democratic state,
year in and year out, without falling, to some extent at least, under
that moral obsession which is the hall-mark of the mob-man set
free. A citizen of such astate, his nose buried in Nietzsche, "Man