ith such an appalling inability to recognize
it or love it when it arrives that it is more dangerous to be a great
prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple
folk out of their savings. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated
people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate
them malignantly. At best, such qualities are like rare and beautiful
birds: when they appear the whole country takes down its guns; but the
birds receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.

And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from
being troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how
troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo
only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse.
You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not
suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly
unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental
protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single
danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down
all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in
freedom. You have men who imagine themselves to be ministers of religion
openly declaring that when they pass through the streets they have
to keep out in the wheeled traffic to avoid the temptations of the
pavement. You have them organizing hunts of the women who tempt
them--poor creatures whom no artist would touch without a shudder--and
wildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise and conceal the body, and
for the abolition of pictures, statues, theatres, and pretty colors.
And incredible as it seems, these unhappy lunatics are left at large,
unrebuked, even admired and revered, whilst artists have to struggle for
toleration. To them an undraped human body is the most monstrous, the
most blighting, the most obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in the
universe. To an artist it is, at its best, the most admirable spectacle
in nature, and, at its average, an object of indifference. If every rag
of clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of London at noon
tomorrow (say as a preliminary to the Great Judgment), the artistic
people would not turn a hair; but the artless people would go mad and
call on the mountains to hide them. I submit that this indicates a
thoroughly healthy state on the pa