engineers at our works, believes in
the sham refinements he sees around him at the at-homes he is so fond
of. He has no art in him--no trained ear for music or for fine diction,
no trained eye for pictures and colors and buildings, no cultivated
sense of dignified movement, gesture, and manner. But he knows what
fashionable London listens to and looks at, and how it talks and
behaves; and he makes that his standard, and sets down what is
different from it as vulgar. Now the difference between me and him is
that I got an artistic training by accident when I was young, and had
the natural turn to profit by it. Before I ever saw a West End Londoner
I knew beautiful from ugly, rare from common, in music, speech, costume,
and gesture; for in my father's operatic and theatrical companies there
did come now and then, among the crowd of thirdraters, a dancer, an
actor, a scenepainter, a singer, or a bandsman or conductor who was a
fine artist. Consequently, I was not to be taken in like Jackson by
made-up faces, trashy pictures, drawling and lounging and strutting and
tailoring, drawing-room singing and drawing-room dancing, any more than
by bad ventilation and unwholesome hours and food, not to mention polite
dram drinking, and the round of cruelties they call sport. I found that
the moment I refused to accept the habits of the rich as standards of
refinement and propriety, the whole illusion of their superiority
vanished at once. When I married Marian I was false to my class. I had a
sort of idea that my early training had accustomed me to a degree of
artistic culture that I could not easily find in a working girl, and
that would be quite natural to Marian. I soon found that she had the
keenest sense of what was ladylike, and no sense of what was beautiful
at all. A drawing, a photograph, or an engraving sensibly framed without
a white mount round it to spoil it pained her as much as my wrists
without cuffs on them. No mill girl could have been less in sympathy
with me on the very points for which I had preferred her to the mill
girls. The end of it was that I felt that love had made me do a
thoroughly vulgar thing--marry beneath me. These aristocratic idle
gentlemen will never be shamed out of their laziness and low-mindedness
until the democratic working gentlemen refuse to associate with them
instead of running after them and licking their boots. I am heartily
glad now to be out of their set and rid of them, instead of havi