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.

And if you ask, "But what else could any one have done, what could the
most artistic age