The Coast of Bohemia | Page 4

though, that the trotting-match was the only fact of the
Pymantoning County Fair that could be persuaded to lend itself to his
purpose. Certainly, there was nothing in the fair-house, with those poor,
dreary old people straggling through it, to gladden an artistic
conception. Agricultural implements do not group effectively, or pose
singly with much picturesqueness; tall stalks of corn, mammoth
squashes, huge apples and potatoes want the beauty and quality that
belong to them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections of
a county fair-house; piles of melons fail of their poetry on a wooden
floor, and heaps of grapes cannot assert themselves in a very bacchanal
profusion against the ignominy of being spread upon long tables and
ticketed with the names of their varieties and exhibitors.
Ludlow glanced at them, to right and left, as he walked through the
long, barn-like building, and took in with other glances the inadequate
decorations of the graceless interior. His roving eye caught the lettering
over the lateral archways, and with a sort of contemptuous compassion
he turned into the Fine Arts Department.
The fine arts were mostly represented by photographs and crazy quilts;
but there were also tambourines and round brass plaques painted with
flowers, and little satin banners painted with birds or autumn leaves,
and gilt rolling-pins with vines. There were medley-pictures contrived
of photographs cut out and grouped together in novel and unexpected
relations; and there were set about divers patterns and pretences in
keramics, as the decoration of earthen pots and jars was called. Besides
these were sketches in oil and charcoal, which Ludlow found worse

than the more primitive things, with their second-hand chic picked up
in a tenth-rate school. He began to ask himself whether people tasteless
enough to produce these inanities and imagine them artistic, could form
even the subjects of art; he began to have doubts of his impression of
the trotting-match, its value, its possibility of importance. The senseless
ugliness of the things really hurt him: his worship of beauty was a sort
of religion, and their badness was a sort of blasphemy. He could not
laugh at them; he wished he could; and his first impulse was to turn and
escape from the Fine Arts Department, and keep what little faith in the
artistic future of the country he had been able to get together during his
long sojourn out of it. Since his return he had made sure of the feeling
for color and form with which his country-women dressed themselves.
There was no mistake about that; even here, in the rustic heart of the
continent he had seen costumes which had touch and distinction; and it
could not be that the instinct which they sprang from should go for
nothing in the arts supposed higher than mantua-making and millinery.
The village girls whom he saw so prettily gowned and picturesquely
hatted on the benches out there by the race-course, could it have been
they who committed these atrocities? Or did these come up from yet
deeper depths of the country, where the vague, shallow talk about art
going on for the past decade was having its first crude effect? Ludlow
was exasperated as well as pained, for he knew that the pretty frocks
and hats expressed a love of dressing prettily, which was honest and
genuine enough, while the unhappy effects about him could spring only
from a hollow vanity far lower than a woman's wish to be charming. It
was not an innate impulse which produced them, but a sham ambition,
implanted from without, and artificially stimulated by the false and
fleeting mood of the time. They must really hamper the growth of
æsthetic knowledge among people who were not destitute of the
instinct.
He exaggerated the importance of the fact with the sensitiveness of a
man to whom æsthetic cultivation was all-important. It appeared to him
a far greater evil than it was; it was odious to him, like a vice; it was
almost a crime. He spent a very miserable time in the Fine Arts
Department of the Pymantoning County Agricultural Fair; and in a kind
of horrible fascination he began to review the collection in detail, to

guess its causes in severalty and to philosophize its lamentable
consequences.

III.
In this process Ludlow discovered that there was more of the Fine Arts
Department than he had supposed at first. He was aware of some
women who had come into the next aisle or section, and presently he
overheard fragments of their talk.
A girl's voice said passionately: "I don't care! I shan't leave them here
for folks to make remarks about! I knew they wouldn't take the
premium, and I hope you're satisfied now, mother."
"Well, you're a very silly child," came in an