342 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

safely guided by his likings, if he be not also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such fashion as this: “I don’t seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm of--& Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: “I don’t seem quite fit to be headmanager in the firm of--& Co., but I dare say I might do something in a small greengrocery business; I used to be a good judge of pease;” that is to say, always trying lower instead of trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every one in his neighbourhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold more shameful in foolish people’s, i.e., in most people’s¹ eyes, to remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever a man’s position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his duty to try to be a “gentleman.” Persons who have any influence in the management of public institutions for charitable education know how common this feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to

¹ [Compare Carlyle’s Latter-day Pamphlets, No. vi.: “twenty-seven millions, mostly fools.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]