stains,
Feed and speed for braver mornings
Valorously the growth of brains.
Power, the hard man knit for action
Reads each nation on the brow;
Cripple, fool, and petrifaction
Fall to him--are falling now.

And again:

She impious to the Lord of hosts
The valour of her off-spring boasts,
Mindless that now on land and main
His heeded prayer is active brain.

These faithful prophets were not heeded, and we have had to learn our
lesson in the school of experience. She is a good teacher but her fees
are very high.

The author of _Friendship's Garland_ ended with a despairing appeal to
the democracy, when his jeremiads evoked no response from the upper
class, whom he called barbarians, or from the middle class, whom he
regarded as incurably vulgar. The middle classes are apt to receive
hard measure; they have few friends and many critics. We must go back
to Euripides to find the bold statement that they are the best part of
the community and "the salvation of the State"; but it is, on the
whole, true. And our middle class is only superficially vulgar.
Vulgarity, as Mr Robert Bridges has lately said, "is blindness to
values; it is spiritual death." The middle class in Matthew Arnold's
time was no doubt deplorably blind to artistic values; its productions
survive to convict it of what he called Philistinism; but it is no
longer devoid of taste or indifferent to beauty. And it has never been
a contemptible artist in life. Mr Bridges describes the progress of
vulgarity as an inverted Platonic progress. We descend, he says, from
ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles,
till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity.
This identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was
something of a paradox even in Greece, and does not fit the English
character at all. Our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings
rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass
windows seem to shout for a friendly Zeppelin to obliterate them. But
we British have not descended to ugly conduct. Pericles and Plato
would have found the bearing of this people in its supreme trial more
"beautiful" than the Parthenon itself. The nation has shaken off its
vulgarity even more easily and completely than its slackness and
self-indulgence. We have borne ourselves with a courage, restraint,
and dignity which, a Greek would say, could have only been expected