On one of the few occasions in
which I had a peep into the interior of his mind, I was surprised to
find that he had a strong class-feeling. He had an obvious contempt for
what may be called the upper class, and gave me to understand that he
thought their sense of superiority a very false one. He thought of them
simply as the people, so to speak, in possession, but entirely lacking
in moral purpose and ideal. I said something about the agreeable,
sympathetic courtesy of well-bred people, and he made it plain that he
regarded it as a sort of expensive and useless product. He had, I
found, a different kind of contempt for the lower classes, regarding
them as thriftless and unenterprising. In fact, the professional middle
class seemed to him to have a monopoly of the virtues--common-sense,
simplicity, respectability.
Two things for which he has no kind of sympathy are art and music,
which appear to him to be a kind of harmless and elegant trifling. I am
afraid that what irritates me in his treatment of these subjects is his
cool and sensible indifference to them. He never expresses the least
opposition to them, but merely treats them as purely negligible things.
He is not exactly complacent, because there is no touch of vanity or
egotism about him; and then his attitude is impossible to assail,
because there is no assumption whatever of superiority about it.
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