HENRY: "In the impression retained by the memory, shades have ceased to count: it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. I cut the silhouette, in a word, out of the curious confusion of it all, I save and fix the outline, and it is with my eye on this profiled distinction that as a critic I speak. It is the function of the critic to assert with assurance when once his impression has become final; and it is in noting this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occasion upon the merits or attractiveness of the entertainment so generously provided for the diversion of myself and friends."
(Lady visitor before swooning has sufficient presence of mind to ring the bell for assistance.)
[Illustration: BROTHER: "What did you say to that old chap just now?"
SISTER: "I only thanked him for picking up my bag."
BROTHER: "My dear girl, you must learn not to be so beastly _grateful_. It's not done nowadays."]
This is an instance of the danger of trying to kill two birds with one stone, for the parody of Henry James's later manner distracts our attention from the main aim of the satire. _Punch_ was more sorry for than annoyed at the children of Chelsea, of ages from five to sixteen, who were said in 1908 never to ask for Dickens or the _Jungle Book_ at the Free Library, but to devour works on "science, sociology, fine arts and religion." In the same year the Sociological Society held an exhibition of charts and plans, to show parents how to select their children's toys "as a profound educational agency," but _Punch_ saw in it nothing but an exhibition of the profoundest Prigmatism--to use a word which he coined in later years. His bitterest comment on the new spirit of the young belongs to the year 1913, when a boy of seventeen rebukes his sister of twelve for thanking an old man for picking up her bag. The best antidote to this spirit was furnished by the Boy Scout movement, which grafted on to the public-school code of "playing the game" the larger ideals of altruism and mutual-as opposed to self-help. I have already spoken of the origin and development of what was the greatest non-official and informal contribution to national education of our times. Logically perhaps it ought to have been discussed in this chapter, but in its wider implications it belongs to the social and political history of the last twenty years.