talk learnedly enough (and fantastically enough sometimes) about
art, and who has at his fingers' ends abundant lore concerning the
art and literature of past days, sitting down without signs of
discomfort in a house, that with all its surroundings is just
brutally vulgar and hideous: all his education has not done more
for him than that.

The truth is, that in art, and in other things besides, the laboured
education of a few will not raise even those few above the reach of
the evils that beset the ignorance of the great mass of the
population: the brutality of which such a huge stock has been
accumulated lower down, will often show without much peeling through
the selfish refinement of those who have let it accumulate. The
lack of art, or rather the murder of art, that curses our streets
from the sordidness of the surroundings of the lower classes, has
its exact counterpart in the dulness and vulgarity of those of the
middle classes, and the double-distilled dulness, and scarcely less
vulgarity of those of the upper classes.

I say this is as it should be; it is just and fair as far as it
goes; and moreover the rich with their leisure are the more like to
move if they feel the pinch themselves.

But how shall they and we, and all of us, move? What is the remedy?

What remedy can there be for the blunders of civilisation but
further civilisation? You do not by any accident think that we have
gone as far in that direction as it is possible to go, do you?--even
in England, I mean?