Arminell: A Social Romance, Vol. 2Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
General
Arminell: A Social Romance, Vol. 2
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
English fiction -- 19th century
Lord Lamerton looked from the tutor to his daughter, and then back
again. What had brought him there? Why had Arminell thus acted in
disobedience to his wishes, and against common decorum? But he said
nothing, he was struck dumb. The world was turned upside down, and those
who had stood on their feet were now on their heads.
Young Saltren took his arm, and he allowed himself to be led away.
He did not recover at once from his bewilderment. He was as a man
stunned. What he had experienced that night was unlike any other
experience he had gone through. A sense of helplessness momentarily came
upon him, of inability to resist the forces of fanaticism, unscrupulous
partisanship, superstition and prejudice gathered against him. He could
neither descend to the personalities and dishonesties of Welsh, nor
climb to the fantastic extravagance of Saltren.
Like a plain Englishman he liked to fight face to face with his
antagonist on open ground, and on a level, to hit straight before him,
and give hard blows; but he was taken in flank, and bewildered among the
tortuous defiles into which he was drawn by Welsh, and unable to touch
Saltren who menaced him from aerial heights.
There are two sorts of culture, as there are two eyes and two ears, and
two hands, and two feet to every man, and two poles to the globe, and
two lights to rule the day and night. But these two cultures are very
different in their effects.
The man without intellectual culture has strong opinions, is rugged and
angular, and is unable to conceive of the possibility of any
qualifications to what he holds as the truth. As he becomes cultivated,
he is cut into more facets, and rubbed down, and still further culture
makes the angles obtuse and multiplies the facets till finally he loses
all angles, and becomes a globe. Friction among his fellow men has
rubbed away every sharpness of opinion, till with perfect culture he
ceases to have any opinions at all. Let us put the same fact in another
way. The rude man comes out of the dye-vat intense in the colour of his
opinions, but every dip he gets in mixed society runs some of his colour
out of him, and after having been plunged a good many times in the
social wash-tub he ceases to have any distinguishable colour whatever.
Intellectual culture makes a man moderate and tolerant, because he
becomes indifferent.
Moral culture has an opposite effect. The uncultivated moral faculty is
dull, and blunt to discriminate between right and wrong; the moral
palate requires training, for by nature it tastes only what is crude,
and distinguishes sharp extremes. The discipline of life, many a painful
experience, and some humiliation, serve to train the moral faculty to
nice distinction, and teach it to shrink from the smallest sources of
falsehood, to avoid the rank and gross, and to acquire the strictest
love of justice. It learns to enjoy the soft velvety port, and to pass
the brandied logwood untouched.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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