the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical
bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat.
He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in
raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It
is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which
blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In
all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as
a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and
thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most
repulsive of colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of
blood or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is no
reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of
civic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of
a thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may
be sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful,
figure of the god of letter-writing. If the mediæval Christians had
possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole
of St Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all
our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under
one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the
miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and
imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth
century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues
underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing
human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to
this pulverising portent chirpily as 'The Twopenny Tube,' they would
have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted
atheists. Probably they would have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anæsthetic