"...it is so easy to say the last word about a crowd, and so difficult to say even the first word about one of the men in it."

Cynics and other persons who suffer from a certain ignorance of human life, have at the back of their minds one curiously fixed idea, the idea that there is in the world a class consisting of what they call ordinary people. They believe that some thousands of black-hatted city men, all exactly alike, come up on recurrent mornings, all exactly alike, from villas exactly alike to offices exactly alike. They seem to think that the people who assemble in literary salons are the only people who have any individuality. As a matter of fact, of course, there are no ordinary people. To the modern artist all city men look alike...In reality every one of them is distinct. If we stopped each of the clerks that pour out of a Mansion House train, we should find that the first one collected Roman coins, and the second one had fought with burglars, and the third thought he was going mad, and the fourth thought (erroneously) that he was sane, and the fifth was a Theosophist, and the sixth was in love. There are quite as many varieties of fools in the world as there are clever men, and the fools are very often infinitely more healthy and interesting. There is no plain background in real life; every detail of it springs forward graphically and assertively as it does in a coloured photograph or a picture by Holman Hunt. The only real fault which defaced the splendid work of Matthew Arnold was a failure to realise this fact, that ordinary people do not exist.... But this tendency of the great critic runs very deep in his work; we cannot help feeling that he took an unconscious advantage of the fact that it is so easy to say the last word about a crowd, and so difficult to say even the first word about one of the men in it. He made great sport of the Nonconformists and their tea-drinkings and evening lectures. But he forgot how imperious and illusive is the mysterious spirit of happiness, and that with a healthy humility, a healthy vanity, and a good digestion, it is possible to have about ten times more of the everlasting joie de vivre at a Baptist meeting than at all the Pagan festivals of the earth.

-The Bookman, September 1902