The Aristocratic `Arry

The Cheap Tripper, pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and the
antiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost
unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs of a
hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does not
necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere
unlettered simplicity of mind.

But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of our
decadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of its
best; one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with many of
the philosophers and artists who denounce him; he looks like a God fearing
fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkeys and concertinas,
crowded charabancs, and exchanged hats, though clumsy, are not so vicious
or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements of the
overeducated. People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc than they are
at a political "At Home," or even an artistic soiree; and if 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