The simplicity
and purity of the women here put one more in mind of the valleys of
the Tyrol than of an English village.'
'And in proportion to their purity, I suppose,' said Claude, 'is
their freedom and affectionateness?'
'Exactly. It would do your "naturalist" heart good, Claude, to see a
young fellow just lauded from a foreign voyage rolling up the street
which we have just descended, and availing himself of the immemorial
right belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by every
woman whom he meets, young and old. You will find yourself here
among those who are too simple-minded, and too full of self-respect,
to be either servile or uncourteous.'
'I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, in
such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper,
than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our own
behoof.'
'True; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists do, say
that you know a place, without knowing the people who live in it--as
if the human inhabitants of a range of scenery were not among its
integral and most important parts--'
'What! are Copley Fielding's South Down landscapes incomplete without
a half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?'
'Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without a
conclusion? Is it not partly because the land is down, and not well-
tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is? And yet, perhaps,
the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of landscape,
when one considers that they are scraps of great, overcrowded,
scientific England in the nineteenth century, is in itself the
bitterest of satires.
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