Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/382

 3i8 EARLY REMINISCENCES And now I will turn to an entirely different subject. That which is so apparent in England and in France is the existence of the bourgeois spirit that may be plainly described as vulgarity. I do not mean that this vulgarity is perceptible in manner or in exterior deportment, but that it exists in the soul, in inability to appreciate what is beautiful. On the borders of Dartmoor is a fine mass of rock rising above the Taw river, a delightful subject for artists, and an object attracting picnickers to the spot. It was seriously proposed, to the County Council which owned this rock, to have it quarried away to furnish material for road-mending. The Council met. Calculations were made and passed round as to the amount of tons of granite that might be taken therefrom. One timid voice was raised in opposition to the destruction of so romantic and beautiful an object. None listened to this plea. Then another man stood up and said : " Is it not possible that the destruction of this tor may stand in the way of summer visitors coming here, lodging in the farmhouses, and even in the cottages, may reduce the price of eggs and butter, and seriously affect the butchers ?" That was another matter. That was an argument which appealed to a commonplace intellect. Mr. Hammerton has said : " The state of mind in which our middle classes and the French bourgeois live, is unfavourable to art in many ways. Competence and comfort and cleanliness are very good and pleasant and desirable, and it is wonderful with how little money a managing couple in the middle classes will procure those blessings ; but when they are made the only aims of life, they bring on an incredible pettiness of soul." If the tradesman desires to have a villa residence—and tradesmen do not often now reside above their shops—it never for a moment occurs to his mind to have a comely and lovable house. All he looks to is that there shall be so many cubic feet of air in 'each room, that the drains shall be in order and have a ventilating pipe, and that the staircase shall be neither too steep nor too angular for the convenient conveyance upstairs of a wardrobe or chest of drawers. I cannot conceive the possibility of men, noble, gentle, and middle-class, having been born without any sense of the beautiful; that they should not possess what is given to the basest savage.