as though the weighty letter had fallen upon
its great toe, and it will forgive anything rather than a provincial
accent. It lives entirely in the surfaces of things, and, as the surface
of life is frequently rough and prickly, it is frequently uncomfortable.
At such times it peevishly darts out its little sting, like a young snake
angry with a farmer's boot. It is amusing to watch it venting its spleen
in papers the _bourgeois_ never read, in pictures they don't trouble to
understand. John Bull's indifference to the 'new' criticism is one of the
most pleasing features of the time. Probably he has not yet heard a
syllable of it, and, if he should hear, he would probably waive it aside
with, 'I have something more to think of than these megrims.' And so he
has. While these superior folk are wrangling about Degas and Mallarme,
about 'style' and 'distinction,' he is doing the work of the world. There
is nothing in life so much exaggerated as the importance of art. If it
were all wiped off the surface of the earth to-morrow, the world would
scarcely miss it. For what is art but a faint reflection of the beauty
already sown broadcast over the face of the world? And that would remain.
We should lose Leonardo and Titian, Velasquez and Rembrandt, and a great
host of modern precious persons, but the stars and the great trees, the
noble sculptured hills, the golden-dotted meadows, the airy sailing
clouds, and all the regal pageantry of the seasons, would still be ours;
and an almond-tree in flower would replace the National Gallery.

Yes, surely the true way of contemplating these undistinguished masses of
humanity, this 'h'-dropping, garlic-eating, child-begetting _bourgeois_,
is Shakespeare's, Dickens', Whitman's way--through the eye of a gentle
sympathetic beholder--one who understands Nature's trick of hiding her
most precious things beneath rough husks and in rank and bearded
envelopes--and not through the eye-glass of the new critic.

For these undistinguished people are, after all, alive as their critics
are not. They are, indeed, the only people who may properly be said to be
alive, dreaming and building while the superior person stands by
cogitating sarcasms on their swink'd and dusty appearances. More of the
true spirit of romantic existence goes to the opening of a little grocer's
shop in a back street in Whitechapel than to all the fine marriages at St.
George's, Hanover Square, in a year. But, of course, all depends o