the priest's house and vineyard; there is a
fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair
of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the
charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former
days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former
days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business
which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing
of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a
necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of
tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments;
barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed
together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were
left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis'
Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the
Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which
delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built
quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays
all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may
be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say
we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite
answer.

With this question another is closely connected. I must explain it by a
simile. A foreign friend of mine insists, with some show of reason, that
much as any two countries of the Continent may differ, England contrives
to differ a great deal more from all of them than they can differ from
each other. Well, it sometimes strikes me that, in a similar way, our
Present may be wholly detached from the mass, however heterogeneous, of
the Past; an island divided from the mainland of history by seas of
difference, or rather, like the great Arctic countries, a separate
Continent, shrouded in mystery, of which we know only that its hitherto
explored shores face, without ever touching, the other mapped-out
Continent we call the Past. For just think, let us say, of the change
implied in the multiplication through machinery of a stereotyped form,
as against the production of an individual object by individual hands.
Why, such a change means democracy far more than any other change in
laws and franchises; and it means, among other things, that any art
sprung really from the present will