drawing and recognising the power of those light and pleasant human sentiments, and then of handling them as if they were so much mud, of treating them as nobody would treat such an idea. You would never find an eighteenth-century artist in pottery who would make one of those pink-and-white china shepherdesses as large as an Egyptian pyramid. You would never find any of them have so bad an instinct as to make a colossal statue of a shepherdess. His profound tradition and culture told him that those kinds of sentiment, while agreeable and healthy and normal to man, are essentially trifles and should be treated as such, should be treated in that light and graceful fashion. But when a man has the pleasant sentiment about the pink-and-white girl which is normal to mankind and then treats it, as I say, as if it were an Egyptian Colossus, he shows that he has at once a familiarity and an insensibility. That is the definition of vulgarity. Most of us, when we have an idea of a pretty girl, do not want to see her face as large as the pantomime mask of an ogre. That is a sense belonging to civilisation, or, if you like, to taste. I take that example out of a hundred that could be given to express what I mean by the danger of vulgarity and its war against Culture.
I have said that it is not particularly democratic. It is not. You do not see poor ragged tramps writing up in large letters on the wall, "Keep that schoolgirl complexion." You do not see a riot of workmen rising and insisting on putting up a hoarding of that kind. The hoardings are put up by very wealthy people who are by this time generally peers of the realm. They are put up by
