"Like shopping!" exclaimed the Girton Girl.
The Old Maid blushed. "I was merely thinking," she said. "It sounds foolish. The idea occurred to me."
"You were thinking of the difficulty of choosing?" I suggested.
"Yes," answered the Old Maid. "They will show you so many different things, one is quite unable―at least, I know it is so in my own case. I get quite angry with myself. It seems so weak-minded, but I cannot help it. This very dress I have on now―"
"It is very charming," said the Woman of the World, "in itself. I have been admiring it. Though I confess I think you look even better in dark colours."
"You are quite right," replied the Old Maid; "myself, I hate it. But you know how it is. I seemed to have been all the morning in the shop. I felt so tired. If only―"
The Old Maid stopped abruptly. "I beg your pardon," she said, "I am afraid I've interrupted."
"I am so glad you told us," said the Philosopher. "Do you know that seems to me an explanation?"
"Of what?" asked the Girton Girl.
"Of how so many of us choose our views," returned the Philosopher; "we don't like to come out of the shop without something."
"But you were about to explain," continued the Philosopher, turning to the Woman of the World, "―to prove a point."
"That I had been talking nonsense," reminded her the Minor Poet; "if you are sure it will not weary you."
"Not at all," answered the Woman of the World; "it is quite simple. The gifts of civilisation cannot be the meaningless rubbish you advocates of barbarism would make out. I remember Uncle Paul's bringing us home a young monkey he had caught in Africa. With the aid of a few logs we fitted up a sort of stage-tree for this little brother of mine, as I suppose you would call him, in the gun-room. It was an admirable imitation of the thing to which he and his ancestors must have been for thousands of years accustomed; and for the first two nights he slept perched among its branches. On the third the little brute turned the poor cat out of its basket and slept on the eiderdown, after which no more tree for him, real or imitation. At the end of the three months, if we offered him monkey-nuts, he would snatch them from our hand and throw them at our head. He much preferred gingerbread and weak tea with plenty of sugar; and when we wanted him to leave the kitchen fire and enjoy a run in the garden, we had to carry him out swearing―I mean he was swearing, of course. I quite agree with him. I much prefer this chair on which I am sitting―this 'wooden lumber,' as you term it―to the most comfortable lump of old red sandstone that the best furnished cave could possibly afford; and I am degenerate enough to fancy that I look very nice in this frock―much nicer than my brothers or sisters to whom it originally belonged: they didn't know how to make the best of it."
"You would look charming anyhow," I murmured with conviction, "even―"
"I know what you are going to say," interrupted the Woman of the World; "please don't. It's very shocking, and, besides, I don't agree with you. I should have had a thick, coarse skin, with hair all over me and nothing by way of a change."
"I am contending," said the Minor Poet, "that what we choose to call civilisation has done little beyond pandering to our animal desires. Your argument confirms my theory. Your evidence in support of civilisation comes to this―that it can succeed in tickling the appetites of a monkey. You need not have gone back so far. The noble savage of today flings aside his clear spring water to snatch at the missionary's gin. He will even discard his feathers, which at least were picturesque, for a chimney-pot hat innocent of nap. Plaid trousers and cheap champagne follow in due course. Where is the advancement? Civilisation provides us with more luxuries for our bodies. That I grant you. Has it brought us any real improvement that could not have been arrived at sooner by other roads?"
"It has given us Art," said the Girton Girl.
"When you say 'us,'" replied the Minor Poet, "I presume you are referring to the one person in half a million to whom Art is anything more than a name. Dismissing the countless hordes who have absolutely never heard the word, and confining attention to the few thousands scattered about Europe and America who prate of it, how many of even these do you think it really influences, entering into their lives, refining, broadening them? Watch the faces of the thin but conscientious crowd streaming wearily through our miles of picture galleries and art museums; gaping, with guide-book in hand, at ruined temple or cathedral tower; striving, with the spirit of the martyr, to feel enthusiasm for Old Masters at which, left to themselves, they would enjoy a good laugh―for chipped statues which, uninstructed, they would have mistaken for the damaged stock of a suburban tea-garden. Not more than one in twelve enjoys what he is looking at, and he by no means is bound to be the best of the dozen. Nero was a genuine lover of Art; and in modern times August the Strong, of Saxony, 'the man of sin,' as Carlyle calls him, has left undeniable proof behind him that he was a connoisseur of the first water. One recalls names even still more recent. Are we so sure that Art does elevate?"
"You are talking for the sake of talking," told him the Girton Girl.
"One can talk for the sake of thinking also," reminded her the Minor Poet. "The argument is one that has to be faced. But admitting that Art has been of service to mankind on the whole, that it possesses one-tenth of the soul-forming properties claimed for it in the advertisement―which I take to be a generous estimate―its effect upon the world at large still remains infinitesimal."
"It works down," maintained the Girton Girl. "From the few it spreads to the many."
"The process appears to be somewhat slow," answered the Minor Poet. "The result, for whatever it may be worth, we might have obtained sooner by doing away with the middleman."
"What middleman?" demanded the Girton Girl.
"The artist," explained the Minor Poet; "the man who has turned the whole thing into a business, the shopman who sells emotions over the counter. A Corot, a Turner is, after all, but a poor apology compared with a walk in spring through the Black Forest or the view from Hampstead Heath on a November afternoon. Had we been less occupied acquiring 'the advantages of civilisation,' working upward through the weary centuries to the city slum, the corrugated-iron-roofed farm, we might have found time to learn to love the beauty of the world. As it is, we have been so busy 'civilising' ourselves that we have forgotten to live. We are like an old lady I once shared a carriage with across the Simplon Pass."
"By the way," I remarked, "one is going to be saved all that bother in the future. They have nearly completed the new railway line. One will be able to go from Domo d'Orsola to Brieg in a little over the two hours. They tell me the tunnelling is wonderful."
"It will be very charming," sighed the Minor Poet. "I am looking forward to a future when, thanks to 'civilisation,' travel will be done away with altogether. We shall be sewn up in a sack and shot there. At the time I speak of we still had to be content with the road winding through some of the most magnificent scenery in Switzerland. I rather enjoyed the drive myself, but my companion was quite unable to appreciate it. Not because she did not care for scenery. As she explained to me, she was passionately fond of it. But her luggage claimed all her attention. There were seventeen pieces of it altogether, and every time the ancient vehicle lurched or swayed, which on an average was once every thirty seconds, she was in terror lest one or more of them should be jerked out. Half her day was taken up in counting them and re-arranging them, and the only view in which she was interested was the cloud of dust behind us. One bonnet-box did contrive during the course of the journey to make its escape, after which she sat with her arms round as many of the remaining sixteen articles as she could encompass, and sighed."