The Manawatu Herald. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1906. IS THE WORED GROWING VUEGAR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3723, 29 November 1906, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1906. IS THE WORED GROWING VUEGAR.

A celebrated British Academician, Sir William Blake Richmond, is very pessimistic over the alleged “ vulgarisation ’' of the world. It is, he finds, growing uglier, more superficial, and more common. There is less creation and more imitation; commerce is flooding the market with cheap, unlovely, and undesirable objects ; bad taste is displayed in dress, the average sense of beauty has grown distinctly weaker and duller. Perhaps, says the sorrowful academician, all this vulgarisation is the result of our popular education, which stuffs the popular mind with heterogeneous knowledge. Commenting on the above, an American paper remarks: It is greatly to be feared that the academician has forgotten his history. Not the history of kings, wars, and intrigues, but that of the life and labour of the masses. A reading of such works as Thorold Rogers’ “ Six Centuries of Work and Wages” and “Economic Interpretation of History, ” or Eecky’s “History of European Morals,” would measurably relieve his gloom and despair. Possibly a. course in early English fiction—j easier reading, no doubt-^would

be beneficial and curative. Nothing, in truth, is more absurd than the notion that the world is growing more superficial and more vulgar by reason of popular education, invention, machinery, and material progress generally. Is absolute ignorance, illiteracy, more favourable to art and culture and refinement than partial education ? Is a world which reads infinitely more, which sees more pictures and statues, thanks to the multiplying art galleries; which hears more music, which has a hundred free libraries where it formerly had one or none, which has more theatres, which enjoys more comforts and has more opportunities in every direction —is such a world more vulgar and superficial than one which, so far as the masses of the people are concerned, is sans books, sans pictures, sans music, sans comforts ? The question really answers itself. Comparethe circulation of a good book to-day, in any “line,” with that of a half century ago. Compare the average English workman or farmer of to-day with that of the pre-reform era, so far as literary and other data permit the comparison to be made. Compare contemporary intemperance with that of “ merrie England ” of the first decades of the last century. Which period shows more brutality, more drunkenness, more stupidity ? The superior person who deplores “growing vulgarity” talks of a world he does not know either ia its present or in its past.