Gossip is a thing which for some reason or other is spoken of with an intonation of disdain. We have all read meditations by modern ladies and gentlemen, saying how sad and mysterious it is that the old women in the Whitechapel Road talk about their neighbours, and refuse to talk about culture or evolution. Yet the reason why they do not talk about culture and evolution but do talk about their neighbours is, after all, a very simple one. They do it because their neighbours are much more important a subject than culture or evolution. Long before anybody had ever heard of culture or evolution people had begun in the old primitive and religious phrase to consider their duty towards their neighbour. And one of our duties towards our neighbour is to talk about him.

It is hard for the average man to love his neighbour as he loves himself; but he had at least taken some step towards the Christian ideal if he can worry about his neighbour as he worries about himself. And it is entirely absurd of the modern education idealists to demand humanitarianism and yet discourage gossip. Gossip is the one really practical form of humanitarianism established securely in the world. It is the really practical, popular, and existing confession of human fraternity. These simple people, women especially, are accused of talking trivialities about people. How strangely blasphemous is the very idea and expression. How can there be any such thing as trivialities about People? How can we expect the landlady in Whitechapel to desert the really deep, complex, and intellectual problem of the lady next door for the sake of some lecturer's superficialities about Dante or Browning? No, my philanthropic friends, the poor will do justice to culture on the day that you do justice to gossip.

If, then, I say that such books as Mr. Fitzgerald's book on Dickens are gossip; it is not a thing to be condemned either from a moral or from an intellectual point of view. Gossip may be defined roughly as a continuous interest in all minor human matters. It is a refusal to 'mind one's own business'—that heathen and egotistical commandment.

-September 13, 1905, Daily News (London)