They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They
endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they
mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to
one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal
of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in
England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible,
considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter,
so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of
Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither
the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the
beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama;
and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the
development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use
of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of
Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as
bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new
forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like
somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody
else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did
anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode
of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two
stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.
What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they
say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has
said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a
work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made
a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has
reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they