cashiering most kings and senates, and
creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great
things are being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness
from our streets and our homes, and to make both the outside and the
inside of our dwellings worthy of a world where there are forests, and
flower-tressed meadows, and the plumage of birds; where the insects
carry lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a
stagnant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most
delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are modifying opinions, for they
are modifying men's moods and habits, which are the mothers of
opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the
responsible father--Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing
towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and
the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the
ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets,
brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect
akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such
surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and
that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external
senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is
taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle
relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids
that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our
intellectual discernment; and--more than that--as it is probable that
fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily
organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely
combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of
our systems, apart from any conscious delight in them. A savage may
indulge in discordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think
that they please the gods, but it does not follow that his frame would
not be favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand church
organ. One sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of
wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of
illness. And if an evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along
with an evil state of mind, who shall say that the
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