Now if you protest against this, educated people will instantly answer you, “Oh, it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones and carve names and spoil the look of Stonehenge.”  It does not seem to occur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look of Stonehenge.  The scratching of a name, particularly when performed with blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect School Board education, can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable from the grayest hieroglyphic by the grandest Druid of old.  But nobody could get a modern policeman into the same picture with a Druid.  This really vital piece of vandalism was done by the educated, not the uneducated; it was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wanted to preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge.  It seems to me curious to preserve your lady’s beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over; or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing it green.

And if you ask, “But what else could any one have done, what could the most artistic age have done to save the monument?” I reply, “There are hundreds of things that Greeks or Mediaevals might have done; and I have no notion what they would have chosen; but I say that by an instinct in their whole society they would have done something that was decent and serious and suitable to the place.  Perhaps some family of knights or warriors would have the hereditary duty of guarding such a place.  If so their armour would be appropriate; their tents would be appropriate; not deliberately—­they would grow like that.  Perhaps some religious order such as normally employ nocturnal watches and the relieving of guard would protect such a place.  Perhaps it would be protected by all sorts of rituals, consecrations, or curses, which would seem to you mere raving superstition and silliness.  But they do not seem to me one twentieth part so silly, from a purely rationalist point of view, as calmly making a spot hideous in order to keep it beautiful.”

The thing that is really vulgar, the thing that is really vile, is to live in a good place Without living by its life.  Any one who settles down in a place without becoming part of it is (barring peculiar personal cases, of course) a tripper or wandering cad.  For instance, the Jew is a genuine peculiar case.  The Wandering Jew is not a wandering cad.  He is a highly civilised man in a highly difficult position; the world being divided, and his own nation being divided, about whether he can do anything else except wander.

The best example of the cultured, but common, tripper is the educated Englishman on the Continent.  We can no longer explain the quarrel by calling Englishmen rude and foreigners polite.  Hundreds of Englishmen are extremely polite, and thousands of foreigners are extremely rude.  The truth of the matter is that foreigners do not resent the rude Englishman.  What they do resent, what they do most justly resent, is the polite Englishman.  He visits Italy for Botticellis or Flanders for Rembrandts, and he treats the great nations that made these things courteously—­as he would treat the custodians of any museum.  It does not seem to strike him that the Italian is not the custodian of the pictures, but the creator of them.  He can afford to look down on such nations—­when he can paint such pictures.