the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted the
impudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must be
wholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say it
is certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbal
compromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather than
purity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did
pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the
coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the
word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for
the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly
suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The
great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they
that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start.
Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can
count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who
live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the
purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting
of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called "Art," "The
Greek Spirit," "The Platonic Ideal" and so on--which any navvy mending
the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar as
it deserved.

This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the
participation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is an
important point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It was
certainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty between
the rich _bourgeoisie_ and the old aristocracy, which both had to make,
for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English people
down. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmosphere
in the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except by
the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was
limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:
yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to say
it was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling in
it. It was always saying solidly that things were "enough"; and proving
by that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were not
enough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its
emancipations, sadly. Defin