Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised
this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for
some one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it;
the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently,
but, doubtless, with an uproarious appetite.
Simmons and the Social Tie
It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need
to have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities.
But it is equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality
with which to test ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons,
a charwoman in Battersea, as the touchstone of all modern
theories about the mass of women. Her name is not Buttons;
she is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely a comic
figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face,
a little like that of Huxley--without the whiskers, of course.
The courage with which she supports the most brutal bad luck has
something quite creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive;
her practical charity very large; and she is wholly unaware
of the philosophical use to which I put her.
But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides
I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then.
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