traditions, each generation sees a relaxation of the aristocratic prohibitions, a “gentleman” may tout for wines nowadays—among gentlemen—he may be a journalist, a fashionable artist, a schoolmaster, his sisters may “act,” while, on the other hand, each generation of the ex-commercial shareholder reaches out more earnestly towards refinement, towards tone and quality, towards etiquette, and away from what is “common” in life.
So in these typical cases one follows the strands of tradition into the new conditions, the new homes of our modern state. In America one finds exactly the same new elements shaped by quite parallel economic developments, shopmen in a large store, skilled operatives, and independent shareholders developing homes not out of a triple strand of tradition, but out of the predominant home tradition of an emancipated middle class, and in a widely different atmosphere of thought and suggestion. As a consequence, one finds, I am told, a skilled operative already with no eye (or only an angry eye) for tips, sociable shopmen, and shareholding families, frankly common, frankly intelligent, frankly hedonistic, or only with the most naïve and superficial imitation of the haughty incapacity, the mean pride, the parasitic lordliness of the just-independent, well-connected English.