How
can it exist? The men and women who pass through the whirl of a London
season cannot help regarding their fellow-creatures rather as lay
figures than as human beings. They go to crowded balls and seething
"receptions," not to hold any wise human converse, but only to be able
to say that they were in such and such a room on a certain night. The
glittering crowds fleet by like shadows, and no man has much chance of
knowing his neighbour's heart.
How fast the flitting figures come--
The mild, the fierce, the stony face;
Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some
Where secret tears have left their trace!
Ah, it is only the faces that the tired pleasure-seeker sees and knows;
the real comrade, the human soul, is hidden away behind the mask!
Genuine heroic friendship cannot flourish in an artificial society; and
that perhaps accounts for the fact that the curled darlings of our
modern community spend much of their leisure in reading papers devoted
to tattle and scandal. It seems as though the search after pleasure
poisoned the very sources of nobleness in the nature of men. In our
monstrous city a man may live without a quarrel for forty years; he may
be popular, he may be received with genial greetings wherever he
goes--and yet he has no friend.
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