example, you go back to the old art and literature of the world, let us say, of the eighteenth century, and you find a vast amount of what is called sentiment or even sentimentality, the china shepherds, for instance, that used to stand upon mantelpieces and were recently relegated to dustbins and old curiosity shops, until people began to buy them up again very eagerly. That sort of light and graceful and fragile sentiment is common enough in the history of the world. People were in a certain mood in the eighteenth century, a mood which you may see, for instance, in the pictures of Greuze, and in a great many other places, where certain aspects of levity and charm appealed to them very strongly, and therefore they expressed them, as I say, in little knick-knacks, frivolous little bits of pottery and the rest. They were very pink and white; they represented shepherds very unlike any real shepherds, and so on. All that is, if you like, artificial, but it is not vulgar. On the other hand, while all this was going on, the real shepherds or the real poor people were no doubt conducting their loves in somewhat more candid terms. A transcript of their lives would be called coarse and realistic, but not vulgar. But when you walk down the street and see the whole of one side of a great house, so to speak, occupied with an enormous poster on which is written in large letters, "Keep that schoolgirl complexion," that exactly fulfils my definition of vulgarity. It is vulgar because the man is not a poor peasant unacquainted with grace and elegance, and he is not an over-civilised eighteenth-century artist dwelling too much upon grace and elegance. He is a person capable of
