to answer the question in his pictures of
coster love-making. But are those pictures to be taken as documents, or
are they not the product of Mr. Chevalier's idealistic temperament? Does
the coster actually worship his 'dona' with so fine a chivalry? Is he so
sentimentally devoted to his 'old Dutch'? If you answer the question in
the negative, you are in this predicament: all the love and 'the fine
feelings' remain with the infinitesimal residuum of the cultured and
professionally 'refined.' Does that residuum actually incarnate all the
love, devotion, honour, and other noble qualities in man? One need hardly
trouble to answer the absurd question. Evidently behind the oranges, and
the uncouth animal manners, we should find souls much like our own refined
essences, had we the seeing sympathetic eye. All depends on the eye of the
beholder.

Among the majority of literary and artistic people of late that eye of the
beholder has been a very cynical supercilious eye. Never was such a bitter
cruel war waged against the poor _bourgeois_. The lack of humanity in
recent art and literature is infinitely depressing. Doubtless, it is the
outcome of a so-called 'realism,' which dares to pretend that the truth
about life is to be found on its grimy pock-marked surface. Over against
the many robust developments of democracy, and doubtless inspired by them,
is a marked spread of the aristocratic spirit--selfish, heartless, subtle,
of mere physical 'refinement'; a spirit, too, all the more inhuman because
it is for the most part not tempered by any intercourse with homely
dependants, as in the feudal aristocracy. It would seem to be the product
of 'the higher education,' a university priggishness, poor as proud. It is
the deadliest spirit abroad; but, of course, though it may poison life and
especially art for a while, the great laughing democracy will in good time
dispose of it as Hercules might crush a wasp.

This is the spirit that draws up its skirts and sneers to itself at poor
'old bodies' in omnibuses, because, forsooth, they are stout, and out of
the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh. One thinks of Falstaff's
plaintive 'If to be fat is to be hated!' At displays of natural feelings
of any sort this comfortless evil spirit ever curls the lip. Inhabiting
modern young ladies, it is especially superior to the maternal instinct,
and cringes from a baby in a railway carriage as from an adder. At the
dropping of an 'h' it shrinks