‘Hans Sachs,’ Oliver recommenced with easy discursiveness, ‘remained at once a minnesinger and a cobbler, and I do not know that he either sang or cobbled the worse for it. You will go and listen with satisfaction to an opera of Wagner’s, but not take the moral of the text into account, you most illogical of Fans. Hans Sachs lived in the blooming time of Nüremberg, in the middle ages to be sure. You may think the world has grown too old for simplicity and a higher ambition than rising above the class one was born in.’ ‘What is a higher ambition?’ interrupted Fan, abruptly and incredulously. ‘To raise one’s class and rise with it—much the truer and surer, if it be the slower process,’ answered Oliver, without hesitation or circumlocution, as announcing a thought out and incontrovertible proposition. ‘But if you think Hans Sachs forms too remote a precedent, there is Jasmin, the French barber and poet, quite in our day. And I have heard of a very worthy fellow who is also more than a poetaster, and has yet worked out his “shifts” like a man, going down day by day with his pick and his lamp into the blackness of darkness of a Scotch coal mine. I tell you, child, it is the notion that ability and education will not grace any honest calling and station which is the essence of snobbishness and vulgarity. It has tainted every class in this country. It plays the very devil with many a man who might otherwise have been respected and respectable, a useful citizen and worthy member of society. It causes a certain order of talents and refined tastes to prove a curse instead of a blessing to a working man, even to a clerk, or a shop-lad. I look upon it,’ said Oliver with restrained passion, ‘as being at the bottom of much of the unprincipled extravagance, fraudulent speculation, and criminality and misery which are eating out—not to say the prosperity—the integrity of the nation.’ ‘Then you would introduce Hindoo castes or Russian serfdom into England?’ Fan was a little confused and incoherent in her examples, which was not like her, for she was clear-headed as far so she saw, but she was driven nearly beside herself. ‘You would forbid any man to exercise the gifts which God has given him, and rise to their level in the social scale.’ ‘I would do nothing of the kind. I would have every man be a law to himself, and act up to his own standard—doing his best to raise that standard. I don’t quarrel with any fellow for abandoning tailoring—say, and adopting painting—always provided he has a clear justification for the change by finding it absolutely necessary for the expression of the gift that is in him. I only say that it is done a thousand times every day, when it is neither justifiable nor necessary. It is high time somebody made a stand against the disloyalty and folly.’ ‘And you are the somebody who knows better than every one else!’ said Fan, sarcastically.