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Secondly, a political reason, to get this land distributed among the thrifty middle-classes, and so commit them to the Revolution and to the government which gave their title. It would be a great mistake to suppose that the statesmen of France, or the French people, were ignorant of the dangers in issuing irredeemable paper money.
The liberation will not be complete until those who have already learned to despise the opinion of the lower middle-classes learn also to neglect the standards and the disapproval of people who are forced by their emotional limitations to regard art as an elegant amenity. If you would have fine art and fine appreciation of art, you must have a fine free life for your artists and for yourselves.
"I think they brighten life a good deal; but of course there are people who do not like them the middle-classes." "Yes, yes, they're all very well in their place; but to live with they must be trying," said Guerchard quickly.
Quite so! you select a modern subject, and you paint in the clear bright style, only you adhere to correctly commonplace drawing, to all the habitual pleasing style of composition in short, to the formula which is taught over yonder for the pleasure of the middle-classes.
Nothing occurs in the natural course to bring what is called "good form" into notice and make it attractive, and at the same time the means of bringing this about by art demand more money, more leisure and seclusion, more book-learning too, than the average labourer can obtain. In the middle-classes this is not the case.
There were carriages and gentlemen on horseback; beautiful aristocratic ladies who had alighted from their broughams or landaus; and wet-nurses with streaming ribbons, who carried infants wearing the most costly lace. Of the middle-classes, however, one found only a few matrons living in the neighbourhood, who sat here and there on the benches busy with embroidery or watching their children play.
Except for a few hundred poor devils, navvies, who are always ready to break their bones or other people's bones for no particular reason, just for fun or for the pain, the age-old pain with which they are simply bursting, the whole lot of you think of nothing but deserting the camp and going over to the ranks of the middle-classes on the first opportunity.
The city, from time immemorial the meeting-ground for the best elements in Italian society, had become in the early Middle Ages the one bulwark between the Italian middle-classes and a particularly lawless form of feudalism; and it had served this purpose well.
There is not perhaps a single riot, a single religious outrage in which the middle-classes were not formerly imbrued, because these middle classes were then the mob; but reason and time will have changed them. Their softened manners will soften those of the lowest and most savage populace; it is a thing of which we have striking examples in more than one country.
But there arose the singular phenomenon that Christophe brought into the discussion, if not the upholding of them, a steadily increasing passion, while that of his companions seemed in comparison to diminish. As a matter of fact, they had fewer illusions than he. Even the most violent leaders, the men who were most feared by the middle-classes, were at heart uncertain and horribly middle-class.
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