Critical Studies

by Ouida

Happiness, and its companions goodwill and kindly sympathy, are insensibly suggested and increased by what is beautiful, artistic, and full of good colour and varied design. Even the physical aspect of man is affected by that which it looks upon, that by which it is surrounded, and the French woman was a wise mother who during her pregnancy went to gaze upon the finest works of the Louvre. How much, on the contrary, may the embryo be affected for ill by sordid, dreary, and unlovely conditions which environ the parent during the period of gestation?

There can be, I think, no doubt that physical beauty is degenerating rapidly, and the frequency with which the scrofulous mouth is seen in children, even in children of the aristocracies, is alarming for the future of the race. In the working classes the offspring must be fatally affected by the poisonous trades, the sickening effluvia, the deadly conditions amongst which modern commerce requires its slaves to spend their lives.

Even the country fields are sullied by chemicals and stink of sulphates, phosphates, and human excrements. Agriculture tends to become a mere manufacture, like any other, surrounded by the din of pistons, the fumes of vapour, the jar of wheels.

Beauty is the safest stimulant, the surest tonic, the most precious inspiration; natural beauty first of all, and the beauty of the arts closely following, twinlike handmaids to Aphrodite. But to perceive this the mentally blind are as incapable as the physically blind; and such, mental cecity is as general in these days as myopy is common in the schoolrooms of this generation.

Every year all cities, and even all towns, are severed farther and farther from the country; every year the electric wires multiply for telegraph and telephone; the tramways and railways increase, the sickening grinding noises common to these methods of locomotion fill the air, and the extraordinary ugliness, which seems attached like a doom to any modern invention, is multiplied on all sides. That, in an age which considers itself educated, such hideous constructions as the great wheels of Chicago and of Earl's Court should attract sane persons as a diversion will alone prove how completely the instinct of correct taste, with its accompanying abhorrence of deformity, has become extinct in all modern crowds.

With the ever-increasing use of steam, the beauty of the sky yearly grows dimmer and more veiled. That a race with any pretensions to education and perception can live contentedly under such a sky as that of London would appear an incredible fact, did we not know that it is an indisputable one. Whoever revisits Paris after a few seasons' absence finds the brilliancy of its life more and more dimmed with every decade by the sullying of the atmosphere through the increase of factories, railways and other works, and the invasion by the town of its once beautiful girdle of wood, orchard, and garden. Every year national life everywhere grows less varied, less picturesque, more unlovely, and every year finds the people more contented to dwell with no other horizon than a bank of smoke.

It was monstrous that the selection of the glades and pastures of the New Forest, for military manœuvres, should ever have been permitted by the British War Office. But the mere fact that it was monstrous, that it was an offence to history and nature, that it disturbed and distressed wild life, that it wounded and outraged the feelings of residents and the sentiments of artists, was a reason all-sufficient to make the modern temper brutally enamoured of the idea. Merely because the despatch of the battalions and field batteries thither was a vandalism, and caused pain to more æsthetic minds, military manœuvres in the New Forest became all at once a project to be insisted on and carried out at all costs. The same outrage is now being done to Stonehenge.

The modern temper cannot respect, cannot appreciate, cannot love, but it can hate; and its hatred shows itself in damage and destruction everywhere, whether it set fire to the noble old house of the Hanseatic League at Antwerp, pull down the water towers of Dieppe, plant the jerry-builder before the Lateran, drag a railway train up to Murren, or trample down with ill-shod boy-soldiers the thyme and the bracken of the Conqueor's woods and the turf which the Druids trod.

The modern temper resembles those children in Victor Hugo's romance who, being left alone with the beautiful and ancient Horæ, find no prank so delightful as to tear from end to end the illuminated text of the book and its perfect miniatures, clapping their hands as each fair thing perishes. Nor is there any indication of the advent of anyone who will take the book of the world from the destroying hands, and save what still remains of its beauty.

There is, on the contrary, every sign that the future will see a still greater domination of that rude, cold, and cruel temper which takes pleasure in innovation and obliteration, and sneers, with contemptuous conceit, at those who are pained by such acts of desecration. It is the same sneer, the same leering and self-satisfied snigger, with which it views the expression and evidence of pity for, and solidarity with, what it is pleased to call the lower animals.