Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/268

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ARMINELL.

inability to resist the forces of fanaticism, unscrupulous partisanship, superstition and prejudice gathered against him. He could neither descend to the personalities and dishonesties of Welsh, nor climb to the fantastic extravagance of Saltren.

Like a plain Englishman he liked to fight face to face with his antagonist on open ground, and on a level, to hit straight before him, and give hard blows; but he was taken in flank, and bewildered among the tortuous defiles into which he was drawn by Welsh, and unable to touch Saltren who menaced him from aerial heights.

There are two sorts of culture, as there are two eyes and two ears, and two hands, and two feet to every man, and two poles to the globe, and two lights to rule the day and night. But these two cultures are very different in their effects.

The man without intellectual culture has strong opinions, is rugged and angular, and is unable to conceive of the possibility of any qualifications to what he holds as the truth. As he becomes cultivated, he is cut into more facets, and rubbed down, and still further culture makes the angles obtuse and multiplies the facets till finally he loses all angles, and becomes a globe. Friction among his fellowmen has rubbed away every sharpness of opinion, till with perfect culture he ceases to have any opinions at all. Let us put the same fact in another way. The rude man comes out of the dye-vat intense in the colour of his opinions, but every dip he gets in mixed society runs some of his colour out of him, and after having been plunged a good many times in the social wash-tub he ceases to have any distinguishable colour whatever. Intellectual culture makes a man moderate and tolerant, because he becomes indifferent.

Moral culture has an opposite effect. The uncultivated moral faculty is dull, and blunt to discriminate between right and wrong; the moral palate requires training, for by