The tobacconist should have had a
crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as
butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the
Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling
mistake--a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady--of decreasing
the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did
not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as
good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula,
'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'
For it cannot be denied that the world lost something finally and most
unfortunately about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former
times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but
only as comparatively mean and commonplace; they were dwarfed and
eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the
Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively,
but as positively, mean and commonplace. A man of any station was
represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person--a person
born, as it were, in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was
ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it
being--as, of course, it is--ridiculous for him to deliberately wear
ugly ones.
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