And this 'pigeon-hole' memory--once an impressionist of divine moments,
now the miser of all unimportant, trivial detail--is our tyrant, the muse
of modern talk. Men talk now not what they feel or think, but what they
remember, with their bad good memories. If they remembered the poets, or
their first love, or the spring, or the stars, it were well enough: but
no! they remember but what the poets ate and wore, the last divorce case,
the state of the crops, the last trivial detail about Mars. The man with
the muck-rake would have made a great reputation as a talker had he lived
to-day: for, as our modern speech has it, a Great Man simply means a Great
Memory, and a Great Memory is simply a prosperous marine-store.

What, in fact, do we talk about? Mainly about our business, our food, or
our diseases. All three themes more or less centre in that of food. How we
revel in the brutal digestive details, and call it gastronomy! How our
host plumes himself on his wine, as though it were a personal virtue, and
not the merely obvious accessory of a man with ten thousand a year!
Strange, is it not, how we pat and stroke our possessions as though they
belonged to us, instead of to our money--our grandfather's money?

There is, some hope and believe, an imminent Return to
Simplicity--Socialism the unwise it call. If it be really true, what good
news for the grave humorous man, who hates talking to anything but trees
and children! For, if that Return to Simplicity means anything, it must
mean the sweeping away of immemorial rookeries of talk--such crannied
hives of gossip as the professions, with all their garrulous heritage of
trivial witty _ana_: literary, dramatic, legal, aristocratic,
ecclesiastical, commercial. How good to dip them all deep in the great
ocean of oblivion, and watch the bookworms, diarists, 'raconteurs,' and
all the old-clothesmen of life, scurrying out of their holes, as when in