Besides this, the ordinary aspect of the towns must have been full of romance and interest: the variety, and quaint richness of the citizens’ houses; the colour and fantastic invention in costume and heraldry; the constant shows and processions, such as those organized by the crafts’ guilds, full of quaint allegory and symbolic meaning. A street might be solemn with the black and white gowns of monks and priests, or gay with flaunting banners and the flashing armour of knights, or the panoply of kings and queens. Great gilded wagons, bright with brave heraldry--instead of our black, varnished, respectable carriages, with a modest lozenge on their panels--though these have of late been rather put out of countenance by the more daring and dangerous motor car with its mysteriously veiled and masked occupants, a vehicle lately described by a wit as “a cross between a brougham and a battleship.”
Well, between the ordinary wonders of its mixed and perpetual traffic, we in London have now nothing left as a free popular spectacle but the Lord Mayor’s Show, or the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race. There is the poster, it is true--that cheap and generally nasty “popular educator.” Not always so cheap, either, since one hears of Royal Academicians being secured for the service of pushing commerce at the price of a thousand pounds or so--though the result is generally not a good _poster_, but only an oil picture spoiled.
Human life, however disguised or uglified with unnatural and inharmonious surroundings, must, of course, always remain intensely interesting. If we all took to wearing sandwich boards to announce our personal tastes or wants to save trouble, I suppose a certain amount of drama would still be possible, and I have no doubt we should soon have aesthetic persons declaring that it was as fine a costume as a mediaeval herald’s or Joseph’s coat of many colours.
It does not seem as if we could take art and beauty naturally in this country, since the puritan frost came over us. We have suffered from stiffness in our aesthetic limbs ever since. A certain pedantry and affectation which have attached themselves to some parts of the question of art, seem to have created mistrust in the ordinary mind. The ordinary mind has been too much inured to ugliness, perhaps--and habit is dear to all of us. Conscious efforts to produce things of beauty are not always convincing, and even a thing of beauty does not look comfortable without harmonious environment. If Venus were to suddenly rise from the Serpentine (or from New York Harbour) she might be misunderstood.