Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/95

 a whole generation who vainly warmed themselves in the sunshine of art. At the moment certainly, they felt themselves touched by something agreeable, but when they turned away it was winter in their hearts again. They were a whole generation who considered artists a mere beggarly caste. How poor would have been that generation, if art had not unrolled before them its treasures! Karla belonged to that beggarly age though she never begged for alms. Her education had taught her certain movements that she might not be unattractive, it had taught her certain rules that she might know when she was to blush, but instruction never so came home to her that she could be her own instructor. They taught her even to sketch a little that she might have patterns for embroidery. They taught her a little music, because the piano when properly handled gives out a pleasant sound.

But with it all Karla never once caught the fire of enthusiasm, with it all her spirit continued poor and narrow, without parents, without roof, without home, without clothing, and without warmth. She even learnt something of rhetoric, but as many others learn, the phrases were indeed in her as in grammarians, she got them by rote with the printer’s errors and no fire of enthusiasm breathed upon them to kindle them into life. Her very thoughts moved only in a set circle of phrases and in that grass-grown bed no single flower expanded into beauty or originality.

The fashionable maxims of that generation had but little profundity, and it is to be understood that Karla did not rise above her generation. The maxims of utility ruled supreme, and therefore people were advised only to read books from which it was possible to draw some definitive advantage. Girls might only find amusement in books with which they could conclude a holy alliance. Patriotism entered into their programme that they might feel themselves somebodies and cut a pretty figure in the world: female virtue was preserved because without it there was some difficulty in procuring a husband. The spiritual ties uniting society were weighed in the balance and measured by the ell: if nobleness did not come under the shopkeepers’ measure it was assumed to be of little general utility with mercenary minds; people went to church and paraded themselves triumphantly before the world because they had been to church. They felt the brotherhood of race, but only as people of one castle, against all others they fortified and barricaded themselves.