ed man' means a man who has learned much but
who may have no manners at all, may eat with his knife, forget to wash
his hands, wear outlandish clothes, and be ignorant even of the ordinary
forms of politeness. An 'educated person,' on the contrary, may know
very little Latin, and no Greek, and may be shaky in the multiplication
table; but he must have perfect manners to deserve the designation, and
tact, with a thorough knowledge of all those customs and outward forms
which distinguish what calls itself civilized society from the rest of
the world. Anyone can see that such instruction, on the one hand, and
such education, on the other, are derived from wholly different
sources, and must lead to wholly different results; and it is as common
nowadays to find men who have the one without the other, as it ever was
in ancient Greece or Rome. I should like to assert that it is more
common, since Progress is so often mistaken for Civilization and tacitly
supposed to be able to do without it, and that Diogenes would not be
such a startling exception now as he was in the days of Alexander the
Great. But no one would dare to say that Progress cannot go on in a high
state of Civilization. All that can be stated with absolute certainty is
that they are independent of each other, since Progress means 'going on'
and therefore 'change'; whereas Civilization may remain at the same high
level for a very long period, without any change at all. Compare our own
country with China, for instance. In the arts--the plural 'arts'--in
applied science, we are centuries ahead of Asia; but our manners are
rough and even brutal compared with the elaborate politeness of the
Chinese, and we should labour in vain to imitate the marvellous
productions of their art. We may prefer our art to that of the far East,
though there are many critics who place the Japanese artists much higher
than our own; but no one can deny the superior skill of the Asiatics in
the making of everything artistic.
Nor must we undervalue in art the importance of the minor and special
sort of progress which means a real and useful improvement in methods
and materials. That is doubtless a part, a first step, in the general
progress which tends ultimately to the invention of machinery, but
which, in its development, passes through the highest perfection of
manual work.
The first effect of this sort of progress in art was to give men of
genius new and better tools, and therefore a
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