ss--Shakspeare,
Rabelais, Moliere, Ariosto, Cervantes, Aristophanes, Horace--the evil
odours meet us again at every step. Well, now-a-days this has all been
misunderstood. People have imagined that an inevitable nuisance of the
past ought also to be a deliberately chosen nuisance of the present: a
line of argument which appears to me to be similar to that of a man,
who, because the people of Lisbon used, in the days of my grandfather,
to practise a very primitive system of sewerage, should recommend that
the inhabitants of modern London should habitually empty their slops on
to the heads of passers-by. I am crude? Well, it is by calling nasty
things by beautiful names that we are able to endure their existence. I
think that people who should attempt such literary revivals ought to be
fined, as the more practical revivers of old traditions certainly would
be."

Cyril paused a moment. "I think that these sort of offenders, like
Whitman, are not evil-doers, but merely snobs: they offend not good
morals, but good taste."

"That's just such an artistic and well-bred distinction as I should
expect from you," answered Baldwin, rather contemptuously. "I wonder
what that word 'good taste' signifies to your mind? Everything and
nothing. They are offenders against good taste, you say. Well, let
us see how. If I hang a bright green curtain close to a bright blue
wall-paper, you will say it is bad taste; if I set Gray's 'Elegy' to
one of Strauss's waltzes, that is bad taste also; and if I display all
my grand furniture and plate (supposing I had it) to my poor neighbour,
whose chintz chair is all torn, and who breakfasts out of a cup without
a handle, that also is bad taste. Each for a good reason, and a
different one; in each case I am inflicting an injury, too slight and
inadvertent to be sin, against something: the green curtain and blue
paper combination pains your eye; the Gray's 'Elegy' and Strauss's waltz
combination annoys your common sense; the contrast between my riches and
your poverty inflicts a wound on your feelings; you see that all sins
against taste are merely a hurting of something in somebody. So that, if
writing indecent poems is an offence against good taste, it means that
it also inflicts some such injury. That injury is simply, as the world
has vaguely felt all along, an injury to your neighbour's morals."

"But," put in Cyril, "such a man as Whitman has no immoral intention,
nor is he immoral in the sense