Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/371

 of our symbols, our apparatus and material of war. Then innumerable triumphs of our old, bastard, half-commercial, fine-art were presently condemned, great oil-paintings, done to please the half-educated middle-class, glared for a moment and were gone. Academy marbles crumbled to useful lime, a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instruments shared this fate. And books, countless books, too, and bales of newspapers went also to these pyres. From the private houses in Swathinglea alone--which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly, altogether illiterate--we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap ill-printed editions of the minor English classics--for the most part very dull stuff indeed and still clean--and about a truckload of thumbed and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the dropsy of our nations mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when we gathered those books and papers together, we gathered together something more than print and paper, we gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulæ of dull tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuitites of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions. There was more than a touch of malignant satisfaction for me in helping gather it all together.

I was so busy, I say, with my share in this