sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a
philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in
the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the
same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any
sphere at all--well, nowadays the man of science and the
philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very
few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to
brutal popular control, to authority--in fact the authority of
either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and
greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of
course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on
the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to
interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the
attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art
still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is
aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.

In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which
the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean.
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public
do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public
like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they
have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the
novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest,
the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely
ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such
tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as
England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of
such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too
easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy,