g which keeps secure and
makes harmonious the whole concert of our lives, for we feel it to be a
waste of time, dangerous to the community, contributing neither to our
meat and drink, our clothes and comfort, nor to the stability and order
of our lives.

Of these three possible reasons for our dislike of things as they are,
the first two are perhaps contained within the third. But, to whatever
our dislike is due, we have it--Oh! we have it! With the possible
exception of Hogarth in his non-preaching pictures, and Constable in his
sketches of the sky,--I speak of dead men only,--have we produced any
painter of reality like Manet or Millet, any writer like Flaubert or
Maupassant, like Turgenev, or Tchekov. We are, I think, too deeply
civilised, so deeply civilised that we have come to look on Nature as
indecent. The acts and emotions of life undraped with ethics seem to us
anathema. It has long been, and still is, the fashion among the
intellectuals of the Continent to regard us as barbarians in most
aesthetic matters. Ah! If they only knew how infinitely barbarous they
seem to us in their naive contempt of our barbarism, and in what we
regard as their infantine concern with things as they are. How far have
we not gone past all that--we of the oldest settled Western country, who
have so veneered our lives that we no longer know of what wood they are
made! Whom generations have so soaked with the preserve "good form" that
we are impervious to the claims and clamour of that ill-bred
creature--life! Who think it either dreadful, or 'vieux jeu', that such
things as the crude emotions and the raw struggles of Fate should be even
mentioned, much less presented in terms of art! For whom an artist is
'suspect' if he is not, in his work, a sportsman and a gentleman? Who
shake a solemn head over writers who will treat of sex; and, with the
remark: "Worst of it is, there's so much truth in those fellows!" close
the book.

Ah! well! I suppose we have been too long familiar with the
unprofitableness of speculation, have surrendered too definitely to
action--to the material side of things, retaining for what relaxation our
spirits may require, a habit of sentimental aspiration, carefully
divorced from things as they are. We seem to have decided that things
are not, or, if they are, ought not to be--and what is the good of
thinking of things like that? In fact, our national ideal has become the
Will to Health, to Materi