within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the
most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such
requirements the artist would have to do violence to his
temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of
writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so
would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture,
annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in
him....

"The one thing that the public dislikes is novelty. Any attempt to
extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the
public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large
measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public
dislikes novelty because it is afraid of it.... A fresh mode of
Beauty is absolutely distasteful to the public, and whenever it
appears it gets so angry and bewildered that it always uses two
stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.
When the public says a work is grossly unintelligible, it means
that the artist has said a beautiful thing that is new; when the
public describes a work as grossly immoral, it means that the
artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former
expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.
But it probably uses the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob
will use ready-made paving-stones. _There is not a single real poet
or prose-writer of this_ (the nineteenth) _century on whom the
British public has not solemnly conferred diplomas of
immorality_.... Of course, the public is very reckless in the use
of the word.... An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The
true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he
is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a
work of art in England, that immediately on its appearance was
recognised by the public, through its medium, which is the public
press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he
would begin seriously to question whether in its creation he had
really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was
not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate
order or of no artistic valu