young men with no family tradition of it to reflect it in their books
and their furniture; and--this yet more particularly--to young men born
out of England yet claiming communion with England, the Anglo-Indians
and the Colonials--I am not sure, I say, that the thing most educational
to these would not be some hundred of Charles Keene's drawings, for
therein they would find what it was that gave them the power and the
wealth that can hardly be defended unless its traditions are continued.
Note how Victorian England dealt with the humour of a Volunteer review;
note how it dealt with the humour of excessive wealth; and note how it
dealt with the humour of schools and of Dons. One might almost define it
by negations. There is in all of it no--but here I lack a word.... When
things ring false it is because they have got by exaggeration or by some
other form of falsity _beside_ themselves. Appreciation of rank or
even of worth becomes snobbishness; appreciation of another's judgment
false taste; and patriotism, the most beautiful, the noblest, the most
necessary of the great emotions, corrupts into something very vile
indeed.

Well, the Victorians, and notably this man of whose power of the pencil
I am speaking, did lack that false savour, that savour of just missing
what one wishes to say or to feel, which haunts us to-day; and I should
imagine that whether it were cause or effect the salt present in the
preservation of the moral health of that society was humour. Let us
enjoy it like an heirloom. It is more national than the language; at
least it is more national than what the language has become under
foreign pressure; it is infinitely more national than our problems and
our tragedies. It is so national that--who knows?--it may crop up again
of itself one of these days; and may that not be long.