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If one had ever lived in Pittsburg, Fall River, or Kansas City, I should think it would be almost impossible to maintain self-respect in a place like Edinburgh, where the citizens 'are released from the vulgarising dominion of the hour. Whenever one of Auld Reekie's great men took this tone with me, I always felt as though I were the germ in a half-hatched egg, and he were an aged and lordly cock gazing at me pityingly through my shell.
With the increasing luxury and love of display that marks modern life the wedding-present tax, as I have heard it called, becomes a burden proportionately heavy to the social ambition of the giver. It seems a pity that there should be so much vulgarising advertisement about what are supposed to be private weddings. There is also too much routine in the choice of the gifts themselves.
The moment we disjoin them from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we do pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our worship of them becomes as mere worship of machinery, as our worship of wealth or population, and as unintelligent and vulgarising a worship as that is.
They were as beautiful under the friendly shadow of their urban oak-tree as were ever Romeo and Juliet on the balcony of the Capulets. I may not tell you what I saw in my one quickly repented-of glance. That would be vulgarising something that was already a little profaned by my innocent participation.
Agreed: but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature.
And with this he left them to laugh at him if they chose caring little whether they did or not. Passing into the hall, he took his hat and coat, he was angry with himself, yet not ashamed, for something in his soul told him that he had done rightly, even as a minister of the Gospel, to utter a protest against the vulgarising of womanhood.
Yet something in this direction ought to be done, for even actors recruited from the 'Varsities will murder the language, debase the currency of manners, mumble unchecked of "libery," and "Febuery," and "seckertery," and in many other barbarous ways betray the vulgarising influence of culture.
And page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time there was, moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarising of the act of maternity.
Later on Sir Arthur did find one story suitable, and The Speckled Band has been successful as a lurid melodrama at the Adelphi and the Globe. In The Little Minister success was achieved by entirely vulgarising a charming book, by throwing away all that distinguished it, and converting what might be called a delicately sentimental comedy into a farce.
"I couldn't be happier than I am; Richard's the best husband in the world. As for his being common, Sara, you know he comes of a much better family than we do." "My dear, common is as common does; and a vulgar calling ends by vulgarising those who have the misfortune to pursue it. But there's another reason, Polly, why it is better for me to leave you.
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