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Page 56
You cannot be contented with it; all you can do is to try to forget
it, and to say that such things are the necessary and inevitable
consequences of civilisation. Is it so indeed? The loss of
suchlike beauty is an undoubted evil: but civilisation cannot mean
at heart to produce evils for mankind: such losses therefore must
be accidents of civilisation, produced by its carelessness, not its
malice; and we, if we be men and not machines, must try to amend
them: or civilisation itself will be undone.
But, now let us leave the sunny slopes of the Cotswolds, and their
little grey houses, lest we fall a-dreaming over past time, and let
us think about the suburbs of London, neither dull nor unpleasant
once, where surely we ought to have some power to do something: let
me remind you how it fares with the beauty of the earth when some
big house near our dwelling-place, which has passed through many
vicissitudes of rich merchant's dwelling, school, hospital, or what
not, is at last to be turned into ready money, and is sold to A, who
lets it to B, who is going to build houses on it which he will sell
to C, who will let them to D, and the other letters of the alphabet:
well, the old house comes down; that was to be looked for, and
perhaps you don't much mind it; it was never a work of art, was
stupid and unimaginative enough, though creditably built, and
without pretence; but even while it is being pulled down, you hear
the axe falling on the trees of its generous garden, which it was
such a pleasure even to pass by, and where man and nature together
have worked so long and patiently for the blessing of the
neighbours: so you see the boys dragging about the streets great
boughs of the flowering may-trees covered with blossom, and you know
what is going to happen. Next morning when you get up you look
towards that great plane-tree which has been such a friend to you so
long through sun and rain and wind, which was a world in itself of
incident and beauty: but now there is a gap and no plane-tree; next
morning 'tis the turn of the great sweeping layers of darkness that
the ancient cedars thrust out from them, very treasures of
loveliness and romance; they are gone too: you may have a faint
hope left that the thick bank of lilac next your house may be
spared, since the newcomers may like lilac; but 'tis gone in the
afternoon, and the next day when you look in with a sore heart, you
see that once fair great garden turned into a petty miserable clay-
trampled yard, and everything is ready for the latest development of
Victorian architecture--which in due time (two months) arises from
the wreck.
Do you like it? You I mean, who have not studied art and do not
think you care about it?
Look at the houses (there are plenty to choose from)! I will not
say, are they beautiful, for you say you don't care whether they are
or not: but just look at the wretched pennyworths of material, of
accommodation, of ornament doled out to you! if there were one touch
of generosity, of honest pride, of wish to please about them, I
would forgive them in the lump. But there is none--not one.
It is for this that you have sacrificed your cedars and planes and
may-trees, which I do believe you really liked--are you satisfied?
Indeed you cannot be: all you can do is to go to your business,
converse with your family, eat, drink, and sleep, and try to forget
it, but whenever you think of it, you will admit that a loss without
compensation has befallen you and your neighbours.
Once more neglect of art has done it; for though it is conceivable
that the loss of your neighbouring open space might in any case have
been a loss to you, still the building of a new quarter of a town
ought not to be an unmixed calamity to the neighbours: nor would it
have been once: for first, the builder doesn't now murder the trees
(at any rate not all of them) for the trifling sum of money their
corpses will bring him, but because it will take him too much
trouble to fit them into the planning of his houses: so to begin
with you would have saved the more part of your trees; and I say
your trees, advisedly, for they were at least as much your trees,
who loved them and would have saved them, as they were the trees of
the man who neglected and murdered them. And next, for any space
you would have lost, and for any unavoidable destruction of natural
growth, you would in the times of art have been compensated by
orderly beauty, by visible signs of the ingenuity of man and his
delight both in the works of nature and the works of his own hands.
Yes indeed, if we had lived in Venice in early days, as islet after
islet was built upon, we should have grudged it but little, I think,
though we had been merchants and rich men, that the Greek shafted
work, and the carving of the Lombards was drawn nearer and nearer to
us and blocked us out a little from the sight of the blue Euganean
hills or the Northern mountains. Nay, to come nearer home, much as
I know I should have loved the willowy meadows between the network
of the streams of Thames and Cherwell; yet I should not have been
ill content as Oxford crept northward from its early home of Oseney,
and Rewley, and the Castle, as townsman's house, and scholar's hall,
and the great College and the noble church hid year by year more and
more of the grass and flowers of Oxfordshire. {12}
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