It is doubtful if even the power of perceiving what is beautiful has not in a great measure left a large part of the population in all countries. Modern cities would not be what they are now had not the race to a great extent grown colour-blind, and become without the sense of proportion. Modern builders and modern engineers would remain unoccupied were not the generations, which employ and enrich them, destitute of all artistic feelings.
Many of the prevailing fashions would be so intolerable to persons with any delicate or accurate perception, that such fashions could never have become general had any perception of this kind been general. Even the deformity of their bodies awakens no aversion in the modern public; if it did, the bicycle would never have been in demand.
Such blindness and deadness to the charm of beauty is to be noted in every nation, and is developed even in the extreme East whenever modern European and American usage influences the Oriental.
Japan is rapidly becoming the rival in vulgarity and hideousness of Chicago.
It is no doubt general and inevitable, the low tone of susceptibility, the dense, thick-skinned temper, which accompany what is called Civilisation, which are to be seen everywhere from cold to warm latitudes, wherever the steam-engine screams and the shoddy suits are worn.
The modern temper is something even worse than inartistic; it is brutally and aggressively hostile to beauty, whether natural or architectural. It will go out of the way to injure, to deface, to uproot, to level with the dust.
To the cold, bald, hard, derisive temper of the modern majority there is something offensive and irritating in beauty, whether it be seen in the stately verdure of a tree in its summer glory, or of an ancient tower,[18] brown and grey in the light of evening. To fell the tree, to pull down the tower, is the first instinct of the modern mind, and it is an instinct clamorous, savage, insatiable, born of incapacity and triviality, of the hunger for destruction, and of a secret and ignoble jealousy.
[Footnote 18: The other day I saw from a railway train a grand old Longobardo tower which had been coloured a bright pink!]
There can, I think, be no doubt that modern education implants and increases this insensibility. If it did not, modern municipalities would not be what they are, would not do what they do. The only resistance to this insensibility is found, and this but rarely, at the two extremes of the social scale--the peasant and the noble, _i.e._, in those who are least subjected to the pressure of general education. In the man, absolutely uneducated, and in the man reared by an individual and highly-cultured education, are alone now to be found any appreciation of beauty, natural or artistic.