He believed that Europe
was made for him, and not he for Europe. He had said that he wanted
to improve his mind, but he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a
certain shame, even--a false shame, possibly--if he had caught himself
looking intellectually into the mirror. Neither in this nor in any other
respect had Newman a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime
conviction that a man's life should be easy, and that he should be able
to resolve privilege into a matter of course. The world, to his sense,
was a great bazaar, where one might stroll about and purchase handsome
things; but he was no more conscious, individually, of social pressure
than he admitted the existence of such a thing as an obligatory
purchase. He had not only a dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust,
of uncomfortable thoughts, and it was both uncomfortable and slightly
contemptible to feel obliged to square one's self with a standard.
One's standard was the ideal of one's own good-humored prosperity, the
prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take. To expand,
without bothering about it--without shiftless timidity on one side, or
loquacious eagerness on the other--to the full compass of what he
would have called a "pleasant" experience, was Newman's most definite
programme of life. He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad
trains, and yet he had always caught them; and just so an undue
solicitude for "culture" seemed a sort of silly dawdling at the
station, a proceeding properly confined to women, foreigners, and other
unpractical persons.
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