,
whither Londoners gravitate by mutual attraction. If you _will_ go and
live in a dingy suburb, you can't reasonably complain that all the
world's suburban. Being the most cheerful of pessimists, a dweller in
the country all the days of my life, I have no hesitation in expressing
my profound conviction that within my memory more has been done to
beautify than to uglify England. Only, the beautification has been quiet
and unobtrusive, while the uglification has been obvious and
concentrated. It takes half a year to jerry-build a dingy street, but it
takes a decade for newly-planted trees to give the woodland air by
imperceptible stages to a stretch of country.

XXII.

_ANENT ART PRODUCTION._

Yesterday, at Bordighera, I strolled up the hills behind the town to
Sasso. It is a queer little cluster of gleaming white-washed houses that
top the crest of a steep ridge; and, like many other Italian villages,
it makes a brave show from a distance, though within it is full of evil
smells and all uncleanness. But I found it had a church--a picturesquely
ugly and dilapidated church; and without and within, this church was
decorated by inglorious hands with very naive and rudimentary frescoes.
The Four Evangelists were there, in flowing blue robes; and the Four
Greater Prophets, with long white beards; and the Madonna, appearing in
most wooden clouds; and the Patron Saint tricked out for his Festa in
gorgeous holiday episcopal vestments. That was all--just the common
everyday Italian country church that everybody has seen turned out to
pattern with manufacturing regularity a hundred times over! Yet, as I
sat among the olive-terraces looking down the steep slope into the
Borghetto valley, and across the gorge to the green pines on the Cima,
it set me thinking. 'Tis a bad habit one falls into when one has nothing
better to turn one's mind to.

We English, coming to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everything
on heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive,
what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea del
Sarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childish
level!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea who
rose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italy
was capable of producing her great painters in her own great day, just
because in thousands of such Italian villages there were work-a-day
artisans in form an