ired to sophisticate them;
whereas, least effort is required, and most effect produced, in the
matter of inducing a mood; the perversion of sympathy is half-way. Of
course, if we could imagine (as once or twice has actually been the
case) that the moral ideas of a whole people were sophisticated, that
would be the worst, because the least remediable; but, in the first
place, people act but little from ideas, or few persons do, and it
is difficult to alter people's ideas; and, in the second place, the
sophistication of conscience of single individuals is kept in check by
the steadfastness of the mass of mankind, and, consequently, as in such
men as Diderot, reduced to mere talk, without corresponding action. But
a mood is easily induced without the reason even perceiving it, and
the more necessary the mood is to nature, the more easily it will be
aroused--the more unnatural an evil, the less danger of it; the more an
evil is the mere excess of the necessary, the more danger there is of
it."

"It is curious how you marshal ideas into their right places," said
Cyril. "There remains one thing to be said about the ethics of
impropriety. The people who go in for writing upon subjects which thirty
years ago would have distinctly been forbidden, do not all of them write
as Whitman does: they are not all what I should call openly beastly.
They do their best, on the contrary, to spiritualize the merely animal."

"That is just the most mischievous thing they could possibly do,"
interrupted Baldwin. "I know the sort of poets you mean. They are the
folk who say that things are pure or impure, holy or foul, according as
we view them. They are not the brutal, straightforward, naturalistic
school; they are the mystico-sensual. Of the two, they are infinitely
the worse. For the straightforward naturalistic hogs generally turn your
stomach before they have had a chance of doing you any harm; but these
persuade themselves and you that, while you are just gloating over
sensual images, you are improving your soul. They call brute desire
passion, and love lust, and prostitution marriage, and the body the
soul. Oh! I know them; they are the worst pests we have in literature."

"But I don't think they are intentionally immoral, Baldwin."

"Do you think any writer ever was intentionally immoral, Cyril?"

"Well, I mean that these men really intend doing good. They think that
if only some subjects be treated seriously, without any sniggering