be found in London. To say that such a
man is insane is, I suppose, going too far; but to say that he does
not know the value or the meaning of the words he uses, to say that he
is driven by an extraordinary and brainless prejudice, is certainly
the modesty of truth.

It is this sort of perversity on the part of Sir A. de Rutzen and of
nine out of ten Englishmen that makes Frenchmen, Germans and Italians
speak of them as ingrained hypocrites. But they are not nearly so
hypocritical as they are uneducated and unintelligent, rebellious to
the humanising influence of art and literature. The ordinary
Englishman would much prefer to be called an athlete than a poet. The
Puritan Commonwealth Parliament ordered the pictures of Charles I. to
be sold, but such of them as were indecent to be burnt; accordingly
half a dozen Titians were solemnly burnt and the nucleus of a great
national gallery destroyed. One can see Sir A. de Rutzen solemnly
assisting at this holocaust and devoutly deciding that all the
masterpieces which showed temptingly a woman's beautiful breasts were
"foul and filthy black spots" and must be burnt as harmful. Or rather
one can see that Sir A. de Rutzen has in two and a half centuries
managed to get a little beyond this primitive Puritan standpoint: he
might allow a pictorial masterpiece to-day to pass unburnt, but a
written masterpiece is still to him anathema.

A part of this prejudice comes from the fact that the English have a
special dislike for every form of sexual indulgence. It is not
consistent with their ideal of manhood, and, like the poor foolish
magistrate, they have not yet grasped the truth, which one might have
thought the example of the Japanese would have made plain by now to
the dullest, that a nation may be extraordinarily brave, vigorous and
self-sacrificing and at the same time intensely sensuous, and
sensitive to every refinement of passion. If the great English middle
class were as well educated as the German middle class, such a
judgment as this of Sir A. de Rutzen would be scouted as ridiculous
and absurd, or rather would be utterly unthinkable.

In Anglo-Saxon countries both the artist and the sexual passion are
under a ban. The race is more easily moved martially than amorously
and it regards its overpowering combative instincts as virtuous just
as it is apt to despise what it likes to call "languishing love." The
poet Middleton couldn't put his dream city in England--a city of