CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 159

§ 21. Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is to the decoration of the railroad station.* Now, if there be any place in the world in which people are deprived of that portion of temper and discretion which is necessary to the contemplation of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of discomfort, and the only charity that the builder can extend to us is to show us, plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it. The whole system of railroad travelling is addressed to people who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable.¹ No one would travel in that manner who could help it-who had time to go leisurely over hills and between hedges, instead of through tunnels and between banks: at least, those who would, have no sense of beauty so acute as that we need consult it at the station. The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. For the time he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind. Carry him safely, dismiss him soon: he will thank you for nothing else. All attempts to please him in any other way are mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you endeavour to do so. There never was more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned with railroads or near them. Keep them out of the way, take them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the miserable things they are, and spend nothing upon them but for safety and speed. Give large salaries to efficient servants, large prices to good manufacturers, large wages to

* Common sense still!-and, this time, indisputable. Well had it been, for many a company, and many a traveller, had this 121st page2 of the Seven Lamps been taken for a railway signal. [1880.]

¹ [For a contrary opinion on this point see George Eliot’s Life, 1885, vol. iii. p. 15. “Ruskin was never more mistaken,” she writes, “than in asserting that people have no spare time to observe anything in such places.” To which criticism, he would have replied that, if the railway service were perfect, there would be no such time to spare.]

² [In the edition of 1880.]

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