ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles,
till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity.
This identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was
something of a paradox even in Greece, and does not fit the English
character at all. Our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings
rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass
windows seem to shout for a friendly Zeppelin to obliterate them. But
we British have not descended to ugly conduct. Pericles and Plato
would have found the bearing of this people in its supreme trial more
"beautiful" than the Parthenon itself. The nation has shaken off its
vulgarity even more easily and completely than its slackness and
self-indulgence. We have borne ourselves with a courage, restraint,
and dignity which, a Greek would say, could have only been expected of
philosophers. And we certainly are not a nation of philosophers. We
must not then be too hasty in calling all contempt for intellect
vulgar. We have sinned by undervaluing the life of reason; but we are
not really a vulgar people. Our secular faith, the real religion of
the average Englishman, has its centre in the idea of a gentleman,
which has of course no essential connection with heraldry or property
in land. The upper classes, who live by it, are not vulgar, in spite
of the absence of ideas with which Matthew Arnold twits them; the
middle classes who also respect this ideal, are further protected by
sound moral traditions; and the lower classes have a cheery sense of
humour which is a great antiseptic against vulgarity. But though the
Poet Laureate has not, in my opinion, hit the mark in calling
vulgarity our national sin, he has done well in calling attention to
the danger which may beset educational reform from what we may call
democratism, the tendency to level down all superiorities in the name
of equality and good fellowship. It is the opposite fault to the
aristocraticism which beyond all else led to the decline of Greek