Will these greater glories be voted,
even by the biggest fools, an improvement? We smile already at the
people of the early nineteenth century who thought that the vistas
opened by applied science were very heavenly. We have travelled far
along those vistas. Light is not abundant in them, is it? We are proud
of having gone such a long way, but...peradventure, those who come
after us will turn back, sooner or later, of their own accord. This is
a humbling thought. If the wonders of our civilisation are doomed, we
should prefer them to cease through lack of the minerals and mineral
products that keep them going. Possibly they are not doomed at all.
But this chance counts for little as against the certainty that,
whatever happens, the primitive and essential things will never,
anywhere, wholly cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that
Brown's Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones' Sonnet Sequence on the
Automatic Reaping Machine, and Robinson's Epic of the Piscicidal
Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of emotion in us. The
subjects chosen by these three great poets do not much impress us when
we regard them sub specie aeternitatis. Smith has painted nothing more
masterly than his picture of a girl turning a hot-water tap. But has
he never seen a girl fill a pitcher from a spring? Smithers' picture
of a young mother seconding a resolution at a meeting of a Board of
Guardians is magnificent, as brushwork.
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