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It is true that tastes differ, especially amongst tourists, who may be divided into two classes those who merely care for the country, let them disguise it as they will, when they can endue it with the features of their town-life; and those who love the country for the sake of Nature, and thus endeavor to carry trails of freshness back with them to town.
The town-plans of the Middle Ages and even of modern times affected areas that were little larger. Only the last days have brought development. Till the enormous changes of the nineteenth century changes which have transferred the termination of ancient history from A.D. 476 to near A.D. 1800 the older fashions remained, in town-life as in most other forms of civilized society.
Nevertheless, the ladies felt that the situation was now dignified by tragic feeling, and remembering keenly how they had been degraded of late, they had a sad enjoyment of the situation. Meantime Wilfrid was leading a town-life and occasionally visiting Stornley. He was certainly not in love with Lady Charlotte Chillingworth, but he was in harness to that lady.
A life in town would kill you in six months. But if you are careful of yourself you may live to sixty or seventy." "Life at any price!" he answered, in his old accents, "yet you put it in a dreary light before me. It hardly seems worth while to buy such an existence, especially with that wife of mine downstairs, who cannot endure the country, and is only a companion for a town-life.
Even in the small old baths of Pompeii there were found about a thousand lamps, obviously used for illumination after dark. But in spite of this and of the invention of candelabra for extending the use of candles, it was never possible for the Roman to turn night into day as we do in our modern town-life. We must look on the lighting of the streets as quite an exceptional event.
Later still, in the early fourth century, the growing care for town-life produced town by-laws and special magistrates to execute them. In some form or other, town-planning had now taken root in the Greek world. The two chief cities of Greece failed, indeed, to welcome the new movement.
The phrase is significant. It is the expression of town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways. A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of such "meetings."
"In a book I was reading the other day, Mike," she said, "the heroine remarked that looking into a great distance always made her long to be better than she was. How true it is at least, with me. I knew what she meant, instantly. I feel it now, don't you?" "That's why town-life is so bad for us," he said. "Our vision never gets beyond the traffic, beyond the progress of commerce.
"You must try to believe that you will soon be as absorbed in town-life as every other woman; that concerts and theatres and balls will make up for green fields and the songs of birds; that men are more interesting than brooks and flowers; that to shop and to gossip are livelier occupations than visiting the poor and teaching little Dick. Don't you think you can imagine it?" She shook her head.
If we consider what are the chief centres of discontent throughout the civilised world, we shall find that they are the great aggregations of population in wealthy industrial countries. Social unrest is a disease of town-life. Wherever the conditions which create the great modern city exist, we find revolutionary agitation.
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