Chapter VII: Part 7

The unwritten law of common honour should make such a book as that which was recently issued on Bismarck impossible, because those who would have the power of writing it would be above the temptation of doing so. There may be a strong temptation to say what we know better than any other of one whose name is eminent. But I doubt whether we should yield to the temptation, even if we ourselves suffer in reputation by not doing so. But the bookmakers of the world have no such excuse as this temptation offers; they are merely footmen who have listened with pricked ears whilst they waited at table on their masters, and when their master is powerless to chastise, sell what they remember or invent. Even where it is not libellous, the sickening intrusion into private life which nowadays disgraces journalism must, to any temper of any refinement and reserve, be an offence irritating beyond endurance. There are flatteries and intrusions beside which censure is sweet and obloquy would be welcome.

There is a great pathos in the fact that the greatest man of these last fifty years, the man of blood and iron, should, as soon as he lies in his coffin, be insulted by such a book as this. The hand in its steel gauntlet, which welded fragments into a nation, is powerless to defend its owner against betrayal and false witness. The vulgar, insatiable curiosity of the general world breeds such traitors as these makers of post-mortem recollections; breeds them, nourishes them, recompenses them. There would be no supply if there were no demand. The general world has a greedy appetite for diseased food; as with its jaws it devours putrid game, decayed oysters, and the swollen livers of tortured geese, so it loves to devour with its frothy brain all that belittles, ridicules, dishonours, or betrays the few amongst it--the very few!--who are above it in mind, in will, in force, in fame. 'Come, come!' they cry to the great man's servants when the great man lies dead; 'tell us, you who saw him in his hours of abandonment, tell us of all that can drag him down nearer to our level! Tell us of his varicocele, tell us of his dyspepsia, tell us of his caprices, tell us of his humours, tell us of his tears when his poisoned dog lay dying--you saw them through the keyhole--tell us of his hasty words, his pettish foibles, his human mortal waywardness--you know so much about them, you who waited behind his chair and filled his tobacco-pouch--come, come, comfort us; his great shadow seems still to lie upon the earth and make us small and crawling insects crushed by his spurred boot--come, come, comfort us! Tell us, show us, make us happy belittling him; let us, the envious, the puny, the mean, rejoice, for you who cleaned his boot and held his bare foot in your hired hand, can tell us that he, the maker of emperors and of nations, he, the Mighty, had Achilles' heel!' For there is an unwritten law, not of literature but of life, which decrees that the jealousy of the small soul for the great soul shall be cruel and deathless as Fate.[10]

[Footnote 10: Since this was written, the letters of Ruskin and Rossetti have been published: a greater offence against dead men could not be committed.]

IX

AUBERON HERBERT

This little square book, the colour of meadow forget-me-nots, is so modest and simple that it may very easily be passed over in a period which has little sympathy with tenderness of feeling and simplicity of expression. The verses, of which this small volume is full, resemble the _stornelli_ and _rispetti_ of Italian songs rather than any kind of verse which has preceded them in English literature, unless it be the earliest and briefest songs of Robert Lytton, with which they have a certain kindred, both in their measure and in their themes. Auberon Herbert is known to the world as a daring and original thinker, a sociologist who lives three centuries before his time, a fearless preacher of new liberties and ideal creeds; in this tiny azure booklet he is also a poet, or, as he would rather himself say, a singer. The verse springs from the depths of his heart, and calls to those who, like himself, have loved and suffered and found nothing endure except the consolations of natural beauty.

'In the West is the golden glory,
As the great king goes to his rest;
In the East the purple staineth
The hills from foot to crest.

'And I stand and look in wonder
Till my heart is cleft in twain,
Half for the vision of glory,
And half for the dying pain.'

Like the Italian _canzone_, these little lyrics, brief as a summer breeze, which momentarily sways the stalks of grass, must be heard with the ear of the heart. Coldly criticised by the mind alone, they will lie like the gathered field-poppy, inert and colourless. They are the cries of the heart, like those brief verses which the southern lover sings to the sobbing lute beneath the moon. He who has killed his heart in the pressure of the world will find nothing in them. They who are steeped in the chill indifference of mundane interests will no more heed them than such heed the skylark's or the linnet's song, which they resemble. They were not written in the study, or fashioned with the pruning-knife; they were born by the edge of the sea, in the woodland shade, by the clover path of the country hedge, in the falling rain of the peach and pear-blossoms, in the starlight above the olives. They are the elder children of the lonely shores and flowering pastures; they have never known the gaslight of the streets or the electric light of the drawing-room. They are as sweet and pure as violets.

To those who know, and respect as they should be respected, the virile and original philosophies of the writer, there is an added charm in these tender blossoms in the fact that they spring from the same intelligence as that which proclaims individualism in its boldest forms and attacks the tyrannies of social and political superstitions.

They are but little songs, short as a ripple of music from a woodlark's throat, of no more account, if you will, than the blue stars of mouse-ear by the brook's side, than the dog-rose on the bank; too simple it may be said, speaking of emotions too trite, of sorrow too common, of sights too familiar, in language that the dullest can scarce fail to understand. Yes; no doubt, they are like field-flowers, like hedge-birds; they claim to be no more than these; they were not wrestled for as Wordsworth wrestled for an ode beneath the shadow of Rydal, or as Coleridge strove with the rebellious forces of a halting sonnet when lying down face foremost amongst 'the common grass.' They are spontaneous utterances, as natural as the ripple of the water over the cresses in a brook's bed beneath willow and alder. It may be easy to dismiss them with indifference, to underrate them with hypercritic sneer, and assuredly those who take pleasure in the strained archaic obscurities of much modern verse will find no more charm in them than the languid aesthete, musing over the pages of Verlaine and Mallarme, would find in a sea-wet breeze blowing across a hayfield at early morning. There is no studied mannerism, no sought-for darkness of expression, no exaggerated ecstasy or pessimism; there is such a natural feeling, of joy as of sorrow, as comes to the soul at once robust and sensitive; and these are expressed with frank, unstudied _naivete_, with the candour as of a child, and the self-control of a man blent in their simplicity. 'Look in your own heart and write,' has been the only precept which their creator has obeyed.

The most intense attachment in them is for the sea. The sea, whether those grey sad tides which sway from the sands of Christchurch to the rocks of Freshwater, or that azure radiance which rolls from the headland of Antibes to the gardens of Porto Fino, has the same magic for Auberon Herbert that it has for Algernon Swinburne; a charm much calmer and more peaceful, but not less strong. Many of these little poems speak of the sea only; are full of that happy sense of return and recognition which so many amongst us feel when, after absence from the sea, we tread again its wet salt sands, and feel its white spray dance against our cheek. Swinburne is the great laureate of ocean, the chords of whose mighty lyre reverberate with the ocean storm and echo the thunder of breakers breaking upon iron shores, and of billows sweeping from pole to pole. The song of Auberon Herbert is the homing cry of the sea-swallows swaying on the crest of the waves.

'Back to the Sea Mother' he calls these yearning lines:--

'Kindest of mothers, from whom I have strayed,
Back again, tired, I come to thee,
Chaunting and crooning the old wave-song;
Sing it, oh! sing it again to me!

'Weary and spent as the hour draws near,
Hush me to sleep with the soft wave-song;
Wash all the cares away, wash all the strifes away,
All the old pains that to living belong.

'Down at thy side I place me to rest;
Slowly my senses are stealing from me;
Passions and pleadings have ceased in my breast,
Gently my spirit floats away free.'

And yet again:--

'Thou great strong sea, fast lock'd in dreams,
Clouds journeying to and fro,
Whose tender blue the stars come through,
I can but love ye so!

'Ye take possession of my heart,
And all my life renew;
Like grain of dust I grow a part,
A small stray part of you.

'Thy sounds, O storm, are far and faint,
As thou stridest over the sea;
And we need thy breath from many a taint
To set us clean and free.

'But when thou comest on mighty wings,
Deal gently with forest and tree,
For my heart is woe for the goodly things
That to-morrow will cease to be.

'Yes! I shall go and you will dream,
And drink the pale blue sky,
Beneath the hill that hugs you round
As silver days go by.

'When others come your love to claim,
You still, you pale blue sea,
Oh, shall you mean for them the same,
That once you meant for me?

'And shall they look on you with eyes
As tender true as mine,
And love each changing gleam that flies
Across that face of thine?'

I dislike the translation of expression from one art to another, otherwise I would call these verses impressionist. They have the quickly-captured forms, the frail fugitive colour, the infinite suggestiveness, which are the notes of the highest impressionism in painting.

See these eight lines:--

'The sun is at rest--for the storms are o'er;
Just touch'd with the hand of night,
And a line of shadow creeps to the shore,
Then flashes in silver light--

'Like a note that stops in its flight and droops,
And clings for a while to the ground;
Then trembles and wakes from its trance and breaks
Into passion and glory of sound.'

How entirely true are these to the breaking of a smooth, pale expanse of water into motion and light; the sudden flashing as of a million spears with which the sea, when smitten by the sword of the Sun, rises to the challenge of Morning. And yet by what simple and common words this strong effect is produced!

Or this:--

'Only a bit of land-locked bay,
With a haunting face on the further side;
Yet the ocean as well might bar the way,
So far from each other our lives divide.

'For you jest at times, and at times you pray,
And you tread a path that cannot be mine;
And the world is with you from day to day,
And all that you are I dare not divine.'

Or this:--

'In the glory of youth the young man went;
His heart with pride was stirred;
"They should yield," he cried, "to the message sent,
And force of the burning word."

'The long years passed and a wearied man
Crept back to the old home door:
"I have spoken my word and none has heard,
And the great world rolls as before."'

Or this:--

'Forward we look, and we gild it all,
Rich is the picture and tender and fair,
Backward we look, and the blue mists fall,
Veiling the troubles that once were there.

'Ah! well, and ah! well, and lighter the load,
If heart the enchanter weave his web;
If he tells love-stories to cheat the road,
And binds in our dreams the purple thread.'

Or this:--

'Ah! love so sweet, and patient, and fond,
I wandered far from thy sight,
And I said to myself that the world beyond
Was a garden rich with delight.

'And there rose an image from morn to morn
Of new bewildering days,
Till my heart grew proud and I thought with scorn
Of the peaceful homely ways.

'For the young are light, and I never had learnt
To know the false from the true,
And my feet were drawn where the far lights burnt
With their wonder strange and new.

'And now how bitter to heart is the taste,
And gone are the folly and pride;
And I save what I can from the years of waste
And stand once more at thy side.'

It will be seen that the store of words at the singer's command is limited; his palette is set with few colours; his lute has but few strings; and it is in this that he resembles the singers of the Italian folk-songs and couplets which have only the limited vocabulary of the peasant to express so many of the deepest chords of human feeling. These English verses might, like those Italian _canzone_, be created by one to whom all the stores of knowledge and of culture were sealed books. They are cast in the simplest of all possible forms of expression, and there is not one which would not suit the plaintive measure of a crooning ballad sung in twilight by the embers of a cottage hearth. They suggest their own music, and it would be difficult to read them aloud without falling into some rhythmical balance of their lines.

Auberon Herbert is, we know by his prose works, master of rich stores of language and of scholarship; therefore this simplicity of style in his verses springs, not from poverty of resources, but from correctness of instinct. These songs are _naif_ as a child's prayer at its mother's knee at eventide; were they ornate or elaborate they would cease to be, as they are now, the frank and spontaneous utterances of the soul, natural, I have said, as song of linnet or of lark.

Let those who love pure, simple, unstudied, and unborrowed things send for the little azure book, and read it for themselves; not in noisy railway train, or metropolitan library, or fashion-filled country house; but in the solitude of some quiet rural place, beside some nameless streamlet where the willow-leaves touch the blue brook-lime and the bees hum amidst the flowering thyme.

When we take it home, as the day dies, let us place it on a shelf between the hymns of George Herbert and those earliest love-songs which were signed Owen Meredith. There it will find its fit companionship.

X

THE UGLINESS OF MODERN LIFE

Pierre Loti has lately written in an album published at Schweningen for charity the following passages, which will be new to the majority of English readers:--

'The end of April is the season of change, when the Judas trees
all along the shores of the Bosphorus are in flower. Nowhere
else in the world does one find so many Judas trees as here,
where the two extremities of Asia and of Europe are face to
face. There are violet-hued tufts and violet-hued alleys; an
excess of violet colour so intense, and so unusual, that one's
sight is dazzled and bewildered by it. And the wisteria too,
which garlands the old eaves of houses with its millions of
clusters, hangs out wreaths of a lighter lilac from all the
hamlets of grey timber which lean down over the water. This
Bosphorus is a great winding river, but a river which has in it
the life and the seduction of the sea. The hills on its two
shores are covered by palaces, by mosques, by cottages and by
tombs, all surrounded by and buried in gardens. And here in
the month of April, under this sky still veiled and softened by
the clouds of the North, there is a luxury of foliage and
blossom in which this violet tone of the Judas trees is
dominant, and shines beside the dark and ghost-like cypress
groves.

'There are on earth other places grander, and perhaps more
beautiful; certainly there are none of greater power to charm.
This scenery of the Bosphorus, from which no stranger ever
escapes, is due to the Oriental mystery which still broods on
it; it comes from the great closed harems of which the upper
storeys hang over the waves; it comes from the veiled women
whom we see in the shadow of the gardens, and in the slender
caiques which pass. But this Turkish witchery is fading, alas!
Year by year, more and more, great gaps are made in the ranks
of the ancient impenetrable buildings, with their grated
windows, which plunge their walls into the water and which one
could enter from the water, as at Venice; and with them go the
slender caiques, the costumes, and the women's veils.

'Already, even since last spring, Therapia seems to exist no
longer, masked as it is by a gigantic and hideous caravanserai;
the exquisite Anatoli Hissar is disfigured by an American
college, of a sinister ugliness, which has stuck itself above
the ancient castle with an imbecile air of domination.

'And everywhere it is the same story, whether on the shores of
Asia or the shores of Europe; frightful new buildings cumber
the ground and factory chimneys rise beside minarets of which
they are the miserable caricatures. In vain do the Judas trees
continue their beautiful flowering; the Bosphorus will soon
perish, destroyed by idiotic speculators. And the Turks, my
dear friends the Turks, have the indolence or fatalism to let
such destruction be wrought every day under their eyes!'

Thus Loti with his poet's soul, his prose which is a golden lyre; and it seems to me as I translate his words that his lament for the Judas trees and the Bosphorus is but the embodiment of a lament which sighs over the whole world. The beauty of the earth is dying, dying like a creature with a cancer in its breast.

The writer of the _Foundations of Belief_ thinks that the earth was made for man; if this presumptuous conviction had indeed any foundation at all what an ingrate would the recipient of the gift have proved himself, what an imbecile, as Loti calls him!

The loss of beauty from the world is generally regarded as the purely sentimental grievance of imaginative persons; but it is not so; it is a loss which must impress its vacuity fatally on the human mind and character. It tends, more than any other loss, to produce that apathy, despondency, and cynical indifference which are so largely characteristic of the modern temper.

The people are taught to think that all animal life may be tortured and slaughtered at pleasure; that physical ills are to be feared beyond all others, and escaped at all vicarious cost; that profit is the only question of importance in commerce; that antiquity, loveliness, and grace are like wild flowers, mere weeds to be torn up by a steam harrow. This is not the temper which makes noble characters, or generous and sensitive minds. It is the temper which accumulates wealth, and which flies readily to war to defend that wealth; but which is absolutely barren of all impersonal sympathy, of all beautiful creation.

Taken as a whole, artists have the kindliest natures and the happiest temperaments of any body of men. Why? because their minds are always more or less susceptible to the impressions and influences of beauty--beauty of line, of hue, of proportion, of suggestion; beauty alike of the near and of the far; and they surround themselves with their own ideals of these in such measure as their powers permit. But, even in artists, modern life tends to deform these ideals, and in any exhibition of modern paintings ninety-nine out of a hundred of these works will be ugly; they will display, perhaps, admirable technique, complete mastery of detail, fine brush work, perhaps unexceptionable drawing, but the combination of these qualities will produce merely a sense of ugliness on the retina of the observer of them.

Unless the man of genius buries himself resolutely in the country and by the sea, as Tennyson did, as Clausen does, he cannot altogether escape the influence of the unloveliness of modern life. It would be impossible to painters and poets to live in Regent's Park or the Avenue de Villiers, in Cromwell Road or the Via Nazionale, or in any of the new quarters of English or Continental towns, unless their instincts of beauty had become dulled and dwarfed by the atmosphere around them; life for any length of time would be insupportable to them under the conditions in which it is of necessity lived in modern cities; and this perversion of their natural instincts makes the tendency to replace beauty by eccentricity and by weirdness fatally frequent. Their critics obey the same influences, and modern art-criticism, like the recent studies of Robert de la Sizzeranne on English painting, is characterised by what appears to be a total incapacity to appreciate the quality of beauty, a total insensibility to its absence from modern art.

In sculpture this is as remarkable as in painting, and is still more alarming and painful, the ugliness of realism and of eccentricity being a still more offensive blasphemy in marble than it is in colour. If the most ordinary sense of beauty, as distinguished from deformity, were not extinct in the world, would any one of the monuments erected within the last half century be allowed to disfigure the cities of Europe? Carnot in a frock coat lying in the arms of a female, supposed to represent France, with his boots thrust out towards the spectator; Victor Emmanuel in a cocked hat with his body like a swollen bladder stuck on two wooden ninepins; Peabody sitting in an arm-chair as if he awaited a dentist; old William of Prussia like a child's tin soldier magnified, and with the greater men who made him dwarfed military manikins underneath; black-metal Garibaldis, and Gordons, and Napiers, and Macmahons; Claude Bernard in the act of mutilating a live dog--every imaginable abomination in every street and square of every capital, and even of every noticeable town, proclaim to all the quarters of the globe the debasement of a once pure and lofty art, and the utter ineptitude and vulgarity of modern taste. Of what use is it to attempt to educate the nations when such things as these are set up in their midst?

An English archbishop at a recent Royal Academy banquet said that he hoped the time was near at hand when every child in England would learn to draw. Apart from the gross folly of teaching a child anything for which its own natural talent does not pre-dispose it, and the injury done to the world by the artificial manufacture of millions of indifferent draughtsmen, what use can it be to attempt to awaken perception of art in a generation which is begotten where art and nature are alike persistently outraged?

It is entirely useless to multiply art schools, and desire that every child should learn to draw, when all the tendencies of modern life have become such that every rule of art is violated in it and every artistic sense offended in an ordinary daily walk.

Amongst even the most cultured classes few have really any sensibility to beauty. Not one in a thousand pauses in the hurried excitements of social life to note beauty in nature; to art there is accorded a passing attention because it is considered _chic_ to do so; but all true sense of art must be lacking in a generation whose women wear the spoils of tropical birds, slain for them, on their heads and skirts, and whose men find their principal joy for nearly half the year in the slaughter of tame creatures, and bespatter with blood the white hellebore of their winter woods.

Beauty is daily more and more withdrawn from the general life of the people. Fidgety and repressive bye-laws tend to suppress that element of the picturesque which popular life by its liberties, and by its open-air pastimes and peddlings, created for itself. The police are everywhere, and street-life is joyless and colourless. Even within doors, in the houses of poor people, the things of daily usage have lost their old-world charm; the ugly sewing-machine has replaced the spinning-wheel, the cooking-range the spacious open hearth, the veneered machine-made furniture the solid home-made oaken chests and presses, a halfpenny newspaper the old family Bible; whilst out of doors the lads and lasses must not sing or dance, the dog must not play or bark, the chair must not stand out on the pavement, the bells must not ring their chimes, only the cyclist, or the automobilist, lord of all, may tear along and leave broken limbs and bruised flesh of others behind him at his pleasure.

If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it. Nor would the auto-car with its stench of petroleum be tolerated for an instant in lanes and roads. Nor could modern dress be endured for a day were there any true sense of fitness, of harmony, and of colour extant in modern times. Even the great Catholic pageants are spoiled in their grouping and splendour by the dull crowds of ill-dressed, dingily clad townsfolk which drown their effect like a vast tide of muddy water rising over a garden of flowers. It is impossible for us, even when looking at anything so fine in colour as the Carnival at Milan, the Fete Dieu at Brussels, the Students' Festivals in Munich, or any other of the great Continental processions, to judge of what their extreme beauty must have been when not only the procession itself but all the people in the streets, all the whole vast tide of sightseers, comprising even the very beggars, were equally full of colour and 'composed' harmoniously with the central figures.

A gorgeous spectacle of the streets now, whether it be popular, military, or religious, is swamped in the mass of dull-coloured hues, and grotesquely ugly head-gear, common to the whole population of a city. Its effect may struggle as it will: it sinks under the preponderating mass as a butterfly will be beaten down under a dirty, drenching, city rain.

There is a modern custom in Italy which is typical of the havoc made by avarice and indifference and commerce running together hand in hand. It is the shocking habit of stripping all evergreen trees of their leaves to sell them to chemists, gilders, dyers, and the managers of what in France we call _pompes funebres_. Even magnolias are not spared, and these magnificent trees stand naked and despoiled in nearly all the gardens and parks all over the country. In every town there are now offices for the consignment and purchase of these leaves; to strip and sell, to buy and export them, has become a recognised trade, and hundreds of tons weight are every year, from September to April, sent out of Italy, chiefly to Germany, Austria and Russia. The injury done to the trees is, of course, immeasurable. After a few seasons they become anaemic, dry up, and slowly perish, whilst the aspect of the gardens of which the bay, myrtle, box, laurel, arbutus, and magnolia were of late such conspicuous ornaments is, of course, utterly changed and ruined. Unless by some edict of the State the practice be speedily stopped, another generation will see nothing of those avenues and groves and alleys of evergreen foliage which have been the glory of Italian palaces and villas since the days of the Caesars.

Follow the architectural history of any city, and you find it during the last half-century the sorrowful record of a pitiful destruction. The great gardens are always the first thing sacrificed. They are swept away, and their places covered by brick and mortar with an incredible indifference. Fine houses, even when of recent construction, like the Pompeiian house of Prince Napoleon in Paris, are pulled down out of a mere speculative mania to build something else, or to cut a long, straight street as uninteresting and as unsuggestive as the boxwood protractor which lies on a surveyor's desk.

The greatest crime, or one of the greatest crimes (for there are others black as night), of which the nineteenth century has been guilty has been the driving of the people out of long familiar homes in the name and under the pretext of hygiene, but in fact for the enrichment of contractors, town councillors, and speculators of every kind. It began with Haussmann; it has continued in Paris, and everywhere else, with delirious haste ever since his time, as a burglar may drag a grey-beard to his death. The modern aediles with their court of ravenous parasites cannot understand, would not deign even to consider, the sorrow of a humble citizen driven out of a familiar little home with nooks and corners filled with memories and a roof-tree dear to generations. Go into an old street of any old city you will, and you will almost certainly find a delight for the eye in archway and ogive, in lintel and casement, in winding stair and leaning eave; in the wallflowers rooted in the steps, in the capsicum which has seeded itself between the stones, in the swallows' nests under the gargoyle, in the pots of basil and mignonette on the window-sills. But the modern street with its dreary monotony, its long and high blank spaces, its even surfaces where not a seed can cling or a bird can build, what will it say to your eyes or your heart? You will see its dull, pretentious uniformity repeated on either side of you down a mile-long vista, and you will curse it.

It is natural that the people shut up in these structures crave for drink, for nameless vices, for the brothel, the opium den, the cheap eating-house and gaming booth; anything, anywhere, to escape from the monotony which surrounds them and which leaves them no more charm in life than if they were rabbits shut up in a physiologist's experimenting cage, and fed on gin-soaked grains. No one in whom the aesthetic sense was really awakened could dwell in a manufacturing city, or indeed in any modern town. The 'flat,' whether in a 'first-class mansion,' or in a 'block' for the working man, would be more intolerable than a desert island to anyone with a sense of the true charm of life, or, one may add, any sensitiveness to the meaning of the word 'home'; that word which is to be found in every language, though the English people do not think so, and which is one of the sweetest and most eloquent in all tongues. The Americans attach extreme pride to the fact that their 'sky-scrapers' are so advanced that your horses and carriage can be carried up on a lift to the highest storey, and the nags, if it do not make them dizzy, can survey the city in a bird's-eye view. But even this supreme achievement of architects and engineers cannot lend to the cube, shared with a score of others, the charm, the idiosyncrasy, the meaning, the soul, which exhale from the smallest cottage where those who love dwell all alone, through whose lattices a candle shines as a star to the returning wanderer, and on whose lowly roof memory lies like a benediction.

According to the statistics of modern cities the mass of middle-class and labouring-class people change their lodgings or tenements every two or three years; three years is even an unusually long time of residence. What can a people who flit like this, continually, know of the real meaning of a home?

The same restlessness and dissatisfaction which make these classes change their residence so frequently, make the wealthier classes flit in another way, from continent to continent, from capital to capital, from one pleasure-place to another, from one house-party to another, from the yacht to the _rouge-et-noir_ tables, from the bath to the coverside, from the homewoods to the antipodes, in an endless gyration which yields but little pleasure, but which they deem as necessary as cayenne pepper with their hot soup.

I believe that this monotony and lack of interest in the towns which they inhabit fatally affect the minds of those whose lot it is to go to and from the streets in continual toil, and produce in them fatigue, heaviness and gloom; what the scholar and the poet suffer from articulately and consciously, the people in general suffer from inarticulately and unconsciously. The gaiety of nations dies down as the beauty around them pales and passes. They know not what it is that affects them, but they are affected by it none the less, as a young child is hurt by the darkness, though it knows not what dark or light means.

Admit that the poorer people were ill-lodged in the Middle Ages, that the houses were ill-lit, undrained, with the gutter water splashing the threshold, and the eaves of the opposite houses so near that the sun could not penetrate into the street. All this may have been so, but around two-thirds of the town were gardens and fields, the neighbouring streets were full of painted shrines, metal lamps, gargoyles, pinnacles, balconies of hand-forged iron or hand-carved stone, solid doors, bronzed gates, richly-coloured frescoes; and the eyes and the hearts of the dwellers in them had wherewithal to feed on with pleasure, not to speak of the constant stream of many-coloured costume and of varied pageant or procession which was for ever passing through them. Then in the niches there were figures; at the corners there were shrines; on the rivers there were beautiful carved bridges, of which examples are still left to our day in the Rialto and the Vecchio. There were barges with picture-illumined sails, and pleasure-galleys gay to the sights, and everywhere there were towers and spires, and crenulated walls, and the sculptured fronts of houses and churches and monasteries, and close at hand was the greenness of wood and meadow, the freshness of the unsullied country. Think only what that meant; no miles on miles of dreary suburban waste to travel; no pert aggressive modern villas to make day hateful; no underground railway stations and subways; no hissing steam, no grinding and shrieking cable trams; no hell of factory smoke and jerry-builders' lath and plaster; no glaring geometrical flower beds; but the natural country running, like a happy child laden with posies, right up to the walls of the town.

The cobbler or craftsman, who sat and worked in his doorway, and saw the whole vari-coloured life of a mediaeval city pass by him, was a very different being to the modern mechanic, a cypher amongst hundreds, shut in a factory room, amongst the deafening noise of cogwheel and pistons. Even from a practical view of his position, his guilds were a very much finer organisation than modern trades-unions, and did far more for him in his body and his mind. In the exercise of his labour he could then be individual and original, he is now but one-thousandth part of an inch in a single tooth of a huge revolving cogwheel. The mediaeval house might be in itself nothing more than a cover from bad weather, but all about it there was infinite variety; all life in the street or alley was richly coloured, even the gutter brawls were medleys of shining steel, and broken plumes, and many-coloured coats, and broidered badges, a whirl of bright hues, which sent a painter in joy to his palette.

Indoors there were the spinning-wheel, the copper vessels, the walnut presses, the settle by the wide warm hearth, the shrine upon the stairs which the women made fresh with flowers. The river was gay with blazoned hulls and painted sails; over its bridges the processions of church or guild passed like embroidered ribbons slowly unrolling; the workman had a busy life, and often a perilous life, but one still blent with leisure; and the mariners' tales of wondrous lands unknown lent to life that witchery of the remote and unattainable, that delightful thrill of mystery and awe, which to the omniscient and cynical modern soul seem childishness too trivial for words.

Try and realise what life was like when Chaucer walked through Chepe, when Henri de Valois entered Venice, when Philippe le Bel rode through the oak woods of Vincennes, when Petrarca was crowned in Rome, when William Shakespeare sauntered through Warwickshire lanes in cowslip time. Read Michelet's description of a Flemish Burgher, and contrast it with the existence of a shopkeeper in a modern town. Read Froude's description of a sea-going merchantman of Elizabeth's days, and contrast it with the captain of a modern liner. You will at once see how full of colour and individuality were the former lives; how colourless, unlovely, and deprived of all initiative are the latter. Being shorn of freedom, interest, and beauty, modern life finds vent for the feverishness which is cooped up in it in commercial gambling--gambling of all kinds from the Stock Exchange to the tontine, from the foreign loan to the suburban handicap--and existence is but one gigantic lottery. Even when a man goes on an excursion of pleasure he will at starting buy a penny ticket which insures his life for a hundred pounds in case of accident! How can such a populace, always haunted by the fear of death, possibly enjoy?

The great increase in cold-blooded and ferocious murders, done on slight motive and with cynical indifference, is the natural issue of this way of looking at life. Who has no reverence for his own life has naturally none for the lives of others. When a man regards his own existence as a mere parcel to be adequately paid for with a hundred pounds, it follows as the night the day that he cannot regard the life of another as worth twenty shillings. Even death itself is made grotesque by modern science, and the arms and legs and headless trunks flung into the air by the explosion of a bomb are robbed of that mute majesty which the dead body claims by right of nature. They seem no more than shreds of cloth or fragments of chopped wood. It is to be feared, moreover, that the extreme facilities given by science for instantaneous and widespread slaughter will lead gradually to greater indifference still in the public mind to assassination, and it will become so common that it will be scarcely regarded with disapproval.

Many verdicts in various countries show the growing indulgence of the law to murders. In France and Italy especially even a cold-blooded murder will meet scant punishment, whilst one due to sudden passion is almost sure of being either wholly unpunished, or very lightly sentenced. In many cases, even in England, the juries have been of an extraordinary tenderness towards murderers whose guilt they were obliged to admit. At Chester, in England, a few weeks ago, four young colliers who set on and stoned another to death, and flung his body in a canal, were sentenced by Mr Justice Lawrance to the punishment of four months in prison for three of them, and nine months for the ringleader, and nothing more.

Many men of violent temper would think so small a price well paid to rid themselves of a foe or of a rival. The excuse for the colliers was that they had all been drinking. This is an excuse very generally made in these days of culture and compulsory education.

It will be said that this has nothing to do with the presence or absence of beauty in national life. But it has much to do with the callousness and apathy and egotism so general in national life; and the ugliness of surrounding influences and poverty of design in the arts so common in modern times are chief factors in generating this lamentable temper.

Happiness, and its companions goodwill and kindly sympathy, are insensibly suggested and increased by what is beautiful, artistic, and full of good colour and varied design. Even the physical aspect of man is affected by that which it looks upon, that by which it is surrounded, and the French woman was a wise mother who during her pregnancy went to gaze upon the finest works of the Louvre. How much, on the contrary, may the embryo be affected for ill by sordid, dreary, and unlovely conditions which environ the parent during the period of gestation?

There can be, I think, no doubt that physical beauty is degenerating rapidly, and the frequency with which the scrofulous mouth is seen in children, even in children of the aristocracies, is alarming for the future of the race. In the working classes the offspring must be fatally affected by the poisonous trades, the sickening effluvia, the deadly conditions amongst which modern commerce requires its slaves to spend their lives.

Even the country fields are sullied by chemicals and stink of sulphates, phosphates, and human excrements. Agriculture tends to become a mere manufacture, like any other, surrounded by the din of pistons, the fumes of vapour, the jar of wheels.

Beauty is the safest stimulant, the surest tonic, the most precious inspiration; natural beauty first of all, and the beauty of the arts closely following, twinlike handmaids to Aphrodite. But to perceive this the mentally blind are as incapable as the physically blind; and such, mental cecity is as general in these days as myopy is common in the schoolrooms of this generation.

Every year all cities, and even all towns, are severed farther and farther from the country; every year the electric wires multiply for telegraph and telephone; the tramways and railways increase, the sickening grinding noises common to these methods of locomotion fill the air, and the extraordinary ugliness, which seems attached like a doom to any modern invention, is multiplied on all sides. That, in an age which considers itself educated, such hideous constructions as the great wheels of Chicago and of Earl's Court should attract sane persons as a diversion will alone prove how completely the instinct of correct taste, with its accompanying abhorrence of deformity, has become extinct in all modern crowds.

With the ever-increasing use of steam, the beauty of the sky yearly grows dimmer and more veiled. That a race with any pretensions to education and perception can live contentedly under such a sky as that of London would appear an incredible fact, did we not know that it is an indisputable one. Whoever revisits Paris after a few seasons' absence finds the brilliancy of its life more and more dimmed with every decade by the sullying of the atmosphere through the increase of factories, railways and other works, and the invasion by the town of its once beautiful girdle of wood, orchard, and garden. Every year national life everywhere grows less varied, less picturesque, more unlovely, and every year finds the people more contented to dwell with no other horizon than a bank of smoke.

It was monstrous that the selection of the glades and pastures of the New Forest, for military manoeuvres, should ever have been permitted by the British War Office. But the mere fact that it _was_ monstrous, that it was an offence to history and nature, that it disturbed and distressed wild life, that it wounded and outraged the feelings of residents and the sentiments of artists, was a reason all-sufficient to make the modern temper brutally enamoured of the idea. Merely because the despatch of the battalions and field batteries thither was a vandalism, and caused pain to more aesthetic minds, military manoeuvres in the New Forest became all at once a project to be insisted on and carried out at all costs. The same outrage is now being done to Stonehenge.

The modern temper cannot respect, cannot appreciate, cannot love, but it can hate; and its hatred shows itself in damage and destruction everywhere, whether it set fire to the noble old house of the Hanseatic League at Antwerp, pull down the water towers of Dieppe, plant the jerry-builder before the Lateran, drag a railway train up to Murren, or trample down with ill-shod boy-soldiers the thyme and the bracken of the Conqueor's woods and the turf which the Druids trod.

The modern temper resembles those children in Victor Hugo's romance who, being left alone with the beautiful and ancient _Horae_, find no prank so delightful as to tear from end to end the illuminated text of the book and its perfect miniatures, clapping their hands as each fair thing perishes. Nor is there any indication of the advent of anyone who will take the book of the world from the destroying hands, and save what still remains of its beauty.

There is, on the contrary, every sign that the future will see a still greater domination of that rude, cold, and cruel temper which takes pleasure in innovation and obliteration, and sneers, with contemptuous conceit, at those who are pained by such acts of desecration. It is the same sneer, the same leering and self-satisfied snigger, with which it views the expression and evidence of pity for, and solidarity with, what it is pleased to call the lower animals.

The Langdale Pikes are being pierced and blasted for iron foundries and slate quarries. The great forest of La Haye near Nancy is being destroyed by military fortifications, and by foundries and by factories. All the valley of the Meuse and the Moselle is sullied with factory smoke and blasting powder. The Bay of Amalfi and the shore of Posilippo are defiled by cannon foundries. The Isle of St Elena at Venice is laid waste to serve as a railway factory. All the Ardennes are scorched and soiled, and sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag. The Peak Country and the Derwent vales are being scarred and charred for railway lines, mines, and factories. Amsterdam, so late the Venice of the North, is becoming an unmeaning mass of modern insignificance and ugliness; what has been done to the Venice of the South is such outrage that it might wake Tiziano from under his weight of marble in the Frari Church, and call the Veronese from his grave.

To destroy Trinity Hospital in London, and place a brewery in its place is a joy and glory to the modern municipal soul. The Hotel Dessin in Calais, made sacred to the name of Laurence Sterne, was a pleasant place with an arched entrance and a large courtyard, round whose sides the buildings were grouped; it had vines and greenery of all kinds, and over the archway were little dormer windows. Behind it stretched fair gardens of great extent, and beyond these was a theatre belonging to the hotel. Of late years it had served as a museum for the town, and was thus preserved intact; now it has been pulled down and razed to the ground, and a huge commercial school built in its place. The funicular railways are ruining the whole of the Swiss Alps; the greed of a few speculators and the irreverent folly of the multitude combine to scar the sides of the great mountains and gather on their summits troops of gaping sightseers, to whom the solemnity of the Gletsch Alp or the virginity of the Jungfrau are of no account.

Zermatt, so late a virgin stronghold of the Higher Alps, is now a mere cockney excursion, and sixty thousand trippers invade its solitude with every summer, plodding like camels in a string, vexing the air with inane noises, offending the mountain stillness with songs to which the bray of mules were music, insulting the crystal clearness of the heavens with the intrusion of their own ludicrous, blatant and imbecile personalities, incapable even of being silent and ashamed. The island of Naxos, whose mere name brings before us so many classic memories in all their loveliness and glory, is being broken up into chips by the emery-workers, and is to be mined for aluminium.

The finest torrent in Scotland is about to be diverted from its course and used for aluminium works. The glory of its waters is to be known no more, merely that some engineers and manufacturers may fill their pockets to the public loss; that some promoters and shareholders, possessing large parliamentary influence, may add to their fortunes. To speak of civilisation, which is a term implying culture, in the same breath with a nation capable of such an action is ludicrous.

The fumes of these aluminium works will, when they are in full blast, emit hydrofluoric acid gas which will destroy all the vegetation on Loch Ness for miles. Yet such is the apathy and want of conscience in modern generations that the annihilation of the Falls of Foyers appears scarcely to meet with any general indignation.

There is no modern mania so dangerous as the present one for meddling with water; no injury more conspicuous and irrevocable than the perpetual interference with lake and stream and torrent.

The lakes of Maggiore, of Como, of Garda, are all being defiled by factories and steam-engines; and even such a writer as De Voguee can look contentedly forward to a time when such erections will disfigure both banks of the Rhone.

The isles of Lake Leman serve for commercial and communal purposes. Thirlmere and Loch Katrine have been violated, and all the other English and Scotch lakes will be similarly ravaged. Fucina has been dried up as a speculation, and Trasimene is threatened. The Rhone is already dammed up, and tapped, and tortured, until all its rich alluvial deposits are lost to the soil of Provence.

It would be easy to fill folios with the bare enumeration of places and memories, of sites and scenes of which the destruction has been accomplished within the last few years. To get money for the preservation of anything is well-nigh impossible; but millions flow like water when there is any scheme of destruction. In an age which prates more than any other of its pride in education, the violation of every law of taste, of every tie of association, of every rule of beauty, is always greedily welcomed with a barbaric shout of triumph.

Lath and plaster circuses or theatres are erected by the Mausoleum of Hadrian, and the miserable caged monkeys of a menagerie pull each other's tails where Raffaele's pavillion stood amidst the nightingale-filled ilex groves.

Frederic Harrison, in his admirable studies of Paris, cannot hide from himself or his readers the loss to art and history which the Haussmannising of the city began, the insanity of the Commune continued, and the barbarism of the present Republic confirms. The ruin of Rome since the Italian occupation is ten times worse and more offensive than even such ruin as would have been entailed by a siege, for it is more vulgar; shell and shot would have destroyed indeed, but they would not have imbecilely and impudently reconstructed. The same sad change awaits, if it has not already overtaken, every city of Europe, and alas! even of Asia. The smoke fiend has entered Jerusalem, and the shriek of the engines has scared the wild dove from her nest in the palm and pomegranate. The Mount of Olives is 'a thing to be done,' and the 'scorcher,' sweating and grinning, drives his wheel through the rose-thickets of Damascus.

Factory chimneys stand as thick in Bombay as in Birmingham, and black trails of foul vapour float over Indus and Ganges; soon their curse will reach the Euphrates. I believe I am correct in saying that the smoke from the funnel of a great steamer or a large factory can be traced for forty-five miles in its passage through the air. Imagine the effect on atmosphere of the continual crossing and re-crossing on ocean routes of tens of thousands of such steamships yearly, of the perpetual belching of such fumes from the innumerable factory shafts annually increased in every part of what is called the civilised world. To India, from England alone, the export of machines and other material for factory erection has been at the enormous rate of L70,000 monthly!

Only let us consider what this means, what destruction of pure light and of fine atmosphere this involves for Hindostan.