Such blindness and deadness to the charm of beauty is to be noted in every nation, and is developed even in the extreme East whenever modern European and American usage influences the Oriental.
Japan is rapidly becoming the rival in vulgarity and hideousness of Chicago.
It is no doubt general and inevitable, the low tone of susceptibility, the dense, thick-skinned temper, which accompany what is called Civilisation, which are to be seen everywhere from cold to warm latitudes, wherever the steam-engine screams and the shoddy suits are worn.
The modern temper is something even worse than inartistic; it is brutally and aggressively hostile to beauty, whether natural or architectural. It will go out of the way to injure, to deface, to uproot, to level with the dust.
To the cold, bald, hard, derisive temper of the modern majority there is something offensive and irritating in beauty, whether it be seen in the stately verdure of a tree in its summer glory, or of an ancient tower,[18] brown and grey in the light of evening. To fell the tree, to pull down the tower, is the first instinct of the modern mind, and it is an instinct clamorous, savage, insatiable, born of incapacity and triviality, of the hunger for destruction, and of a secret and ignoble jealousy.
There can, I think, be no doubt that modern education implants and increases this insensibility. If it did not, modern municipalities would not be what they are, would not do what they do. The only resistance to this insensibility is found, and this but rarely, at the two extremes of the social scale—the peasant and the noble, i.e., in those who are least subjected to the pressure of general education. In the man, absolutely uneducated, and in the man reared by an individual and highly-cultured education, are alone now to be found any appreciation of beauty, natural or artistic.
A French writer, with no pity for the lovers of teas and porcelains, has said recently that he looks forward with joy to the time when the whole empire of China will be covered with factories and mines as thickly as blades of grass grow in a meadow. Most modern persons have no higher ideal than his. In similar phrase, Ferrero, whose political writings I have often cited with approval, and whose striking abilities I greatly admire, but with whose narrow socialist temper I have no sympathy, actually states that the plain of Lombardy was created by nature to be studded with factory chimneys!
Even into remote mountain towns, and in small forgotten cities, on the edge of lonely lakes, or deep-sunk in chestnut woods, or ilex-forests, the same desecration creeps, and sullies, and pollutes. Gimcrack, gaudy villas, and pasteboard houses, show their pert and paltry forms amidst noble palaces, or beside patrician towers. Pistachio green paint makes day hideous everywhere, daubed on deal shutters and blinds, accompanied by the paltry stained doors, and the stucco mouldings, of the epoch. The modern municipality displays its whitewashed and belettered frontage, unashamed, on some grand old piazza, which has seen centuries of strife and splendour. Silent sunlit bays of Tyrrhene or Adriatic, lovely as a poem of Shelley, are made vulgar and ludicrous by lines of habitations such as the jerry-builder of the end of the nineteenth century procreates, wearing an air of smug imbecility which makes one long to slap their stucco faces; of course the drinking-shop, the cycling-casino, and the shooters' club have been run up beside them so that their patrons and frequenters may befoul the roseate evening, and insult the ethereal night.
Moreover, it is strange to note how, with the vulgarisation of the towns and of the landscapes in this classic land, the human physiognomy loses its classic unity and grace, grows heavier, coarser, meaner, commoner, changes indeed entirely its type and colouring; the camus or the snub nose replaces the aquiline, the scrofulous mouth replaces the lips shaped like a Cupid's bow; the eyes diminish in size and grow lack-lustre; the beautiful oval outline of cheek and chin alters to the bull-dog jaw and puffy cheeks; the clear and pure skin alters to the sodden, pallid, unwholesome complexion of the new type. This is no exaggerated statement; anyone can see the change for himself who will take the trouble to observe such young Italians as throng the second-rate and the third-rate cafés and dining-saloons of cities, and then go into the more remote country, and see the Italiote race still in its integrity, in old-world hamlets of the Abruzzi or the Apennines, in forest-sheltered nooks of the Sabine or the Carrara mountains, in sea-faring, wind-swept villages of the Veneto, in nomad sheep-folds on the oak-studded grass plains of the Basilicata, or in old walled towns, calm and venerable, in the lap of the high hills, where the shriek of the engine has not yet been heard; where it is still unknown, that which Loti calls in his latest work, 'cette chose de laid, de noirâtre, de tapageur, d'idiotement empressée, qui passe vite vite, ébranle la terre, trouble ce calme délicieux par des sifflets et des bruits de ferailles, le chemin de fer, le chemin de fer!—plus nivelant que le temps, propageant la basse camelote de l'industrie, déversant chaque jour de la banalité et des imbéciles.'
In the provinces he will still find, in thousands of living creatures, the youths of Luca Signorelli, the knights of Giorgione and Carpaccio, the young gods of Paolo Veronese, the noble grey-beards of Tiziano, the stately women of Michelangiolo, the enchanting children of Raffaelle, and Correggio. But in the towns, and in the country where it receives the moral and physical miasma of the towns, he will find little else but the debased modern type, with its snigger of conceit, its cynical grin, its criminal's jaw, its cutaneous eruptions, its dull and insolent eyes, its stunted growth, and its breath foul with nicotine and chemical drinks, such as the modern schools, and the modern scientists, and the modern dram-shops have made it.