for the evident ugliness and apathy of England with legends of fair
youth and heroic strenuousness in distant continents and islands.
A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that
life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the veldt.
Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that
life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and
Surbiton are "new"; they are expanding; they are "nearer to nature,"
in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile.
The only objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton
are not young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets,
singing with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people
of the Colonies when you meet them young giants or pagan poets.
They are mostly Cockneys who have lost their last music of real things
by getting out of the sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling,
a man of real though decadent genius, threw a theoretic glamour
over them which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is, in a precise
and rather startling sense, the exception that proves the rule.
For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind, but he has it,
not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely because he grew
up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a past--
an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River"
if he had been born in Melbourne.

I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion),
that Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both
weak and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create
a kind of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe,
which it can only share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors.
The notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself
is a dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape