III
If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the Crystal Palace, the age of the first “Locksley Hall,” with its “parliament of man” and “federation of the world,” the age that laid a railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their terms among the heathen in Germany or France.
The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority—most of these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a challenge, vexing those “discoursing wits” who “count it,” Bacon says, “a bondage to fix a belief.” A rebound had to come. And those arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time; perhaps—that keenest agony—of having nothing piquant or startling to say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. “I sat down,” the deserving young author says in The Vicar of Wakefield, “and, finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at a distance, looked every bit as well.” “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men,” “Blessed are the peacemakers”—these and the like might be jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichés of bourgeois morality; they were vieux jeu, like the garnets with which, in She Stoops to Conquer, the young woman of fashion declined to be pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds.