The Cheap Tripper,pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and the antiquaries,really is,I suppose,a symptom of the strange and almost unearthly ugliness of our diseased society.The costumes and customs of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does not necessarily follow from mere poverty,or mere democracy,or mere unlettered simplicity of mind.
But though the tripper,artistically considered,is a sign of our decadence,he is not one of its worst signs,but relatively one of its best;one of its most innocent and most sincere.Compared with many of the philosophers and artists who denounce him;he looks like a God fearing fisher or a noble mountaineer.His an-tics with donkeys and concertinas,crowded char-abancs,and exchanged hats,though clumsy,are not so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements of the overeducated.People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc than they are at a political "At Home,"or even an artistic soiree;and if the female trippers are overdressed,at least they are not overdressed and underdressed at the same time.It is better to ride a donkey than to be a donkey.It is better to deal with the Cockney festival which asks men and women to change hats,rather than with the modern Utopia that wants them to change heads.
But the truth is that such small,but real,element of vulgarity as there is indeed in the tripper,is part of a certain folly and falsity which is characteristic of much modernity,and especially of the very people who persecute the poor tripper most.There is something in the whole society,and even especially in the cultured part of it,that does things in a clumsy and unbeautiful way.
A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge,which I happened to visit yesterday.Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry of Stonehenge it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehenge at all.The vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury,the gray tablelands like primeval altars,the trailing rain-clouds,the vapour of primeval sacrifices,would all tell him of a very ancient and very lonely Britain.It would not spoil his Druidic mood if he missed Stonehenge.
But it does spoil his mood to find Stonehenge--surrounded by a brand-new fence of barbed wire,with a policeman and a little shop selling picture post-cards.
Now if you protest against this,educated people will instantly answer you,"Oh,it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones and carve names and spoil the look of Stonehenge."It does not seem to occur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look of Stonehenge.The scratching of a name,particularly when performed with blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect School Board education,can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable from the grayest hieroglyphic by the grandest Druid of old.But nobody could get a modern policeman into the same picture with a Druid.This really vital piece of vandalism was done by the educated,not the uneducated;it was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wanted to preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge.It seems to me curious to preserve your lady's beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over;or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing it green.
