the Bible if you
have no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental European
is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the
Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of
literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or
lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing,
short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our
souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have
never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured
to it in school, where practically all the teachers are bores trying
to do the work of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire
a truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notion
that fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character. In church,
in the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening
to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we
have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever we
dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our natural
impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man arises
with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this
inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of our
humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and
scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and
persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their
sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We are
all like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation with his
fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an honest woman,
but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who was no
better than she should be.

This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to give
the fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through a performance
of Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just as they will sit
through a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying nothing for two
hours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing through the delay
of its business in Parliament. But their endurance is very bad for the
ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is murdered. I have
heard an Italian conductor (no