crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.

In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to
Cambridge in September--my vision of the world had much the same
relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a
mask has to the direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked
at our world and saw--what did we see? Forms and colours side by
side that we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no
conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things. It
did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do
with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues
of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were
guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.
Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it
with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of
intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.
We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests"
came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely
intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or
dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We
knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a
whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We
were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of
history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and
Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or
Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set
about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed
French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once
in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN
MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.