) play
should become the conscious preparation of infant virtue. All I
contend is that if some kinds of infant amusement result in damage, we
suppress them as a nuisance; and that, if some kinds of art
disorganise the soul, the less we have of them the better.

Moreover, the grown-up human being is so constituted, is so full of
fine connections and analogies throughout his nature, that, while the
sense of emulation and gain lends such additional zest to his
amusements, the sense of increasing spiritual health and power,
wherever it exists, magnifies almost incredibly the pleasure derivable
from beautiful impressions.

VI.

The persons who maintained just now (and who does not feel a
hard-hearted Philistine for gainsaying them?) that we have no right to
ostracise, still less to stone, unwholesome kinds of art, make much of
the fact that, as we are told in church, "We have no health in us."
But it is the recognition of this lack of health which hardens my
heart to unwholesome persons and things. If we must be wary of what
moods and preferences we foster in ourselves, it is because so few of
us are congenitally sound--perhaps none without some organic weakness;
and because, even letting soundness alone, very few of us lead lives
that are not, in one respect or another, strained or starved or
cramped. Gods and archangels might certainly indulge exclusively in
the literature and art for which Baudelaire may stand in this
discussion. But gods and archangels require neither filters nor
disinfectants, and may slake their thirst in the veriest decoction of
typhoid.

VII.

The Greeks, who were a fortunate mixture of Conservatives and
Anarchists, averred that the desire for the impossible (I do not
quote, for, alas! I should not understand the quotation) is a disease
of the soul.

It is not, I think, the desire for the impossible (since few can tell
what seems impossible, and fewer care for what indubitably is so) so
much as the desire for the topsy-turvy. Baudelaire, who admired
persons thus afflicted, has a fine line:

"De la realite grands esprits contempteurs";

but what they despised was not the real, but the usual. Now the usual,
of the sort thus despised, happens to represent the necessities of our
organisms and of that wider organism which we call circumstances. We
may modify it, always in the direction in which it tends spontaneously
to evolve; but we cannot subvert it. You might as well try to subver