the matter, and have not yet come personally into
contact with it) that our moral sense--what I may call our nerves of
right and wrong--is being disintegrated by this purely intellectual
contact with evil. And, moreover, our nerves of right and wrong are,
somehow, much less well protected than our visual or acoustic nerves:
they seem to be more on the surface of our nature, and they are much
more easily injured: it takes a good deal of bad painting and bad music
to deprave a man's eye or ear, and more than we can well conceive to
make him blind or deaf; but it takes less than we think of base
literature to injure a man's moral perception, to make him see and hear
moral things completely wrong. You see the good, simple, physical senses
look after themselves--are in a way isolated; but the moral sense is a
very complex matter, and interfered with in every possible manner by the
reason, the imagination, the bodily senses--so that injuring it through
any of these is extremely easy. And the people whom bad painting or
bad music had made half-blind or half-deaf would be less dangerous to
themselves and to others than those who had been made half-immoral by
poetry."

"But at that rate," said Cyril, "we should never be permitted to write
except about moral action; if the morally right is the same for the poet
as the pictorially right for the painter. Baldwin, I think, I fear, that
all these are mere extemporized arguments for the purpose of making me
satisfied with poetry, which I never shall be again, I feel persuaded."

"Not at all," answered Baldwin. "I mean that the moral right or wrong of
poetry is not exactly what you mean. If we were bound never to write
except about good people, there would be an end to half the literature
of the world."

"That is exactly what I saw, and what showed me the hollowness of your
theory, Baldwin."

"Because you mistook my theory. There could be no human action or
interest if literature were to avoid all representation of evil: no more
tragedy, at any rate, and no more novels. But you must remember that the
impression given by a play or a poem is not the same as that given by a
picture or statue. The picture or statue is all we see; if it be ugly,
the impression is ugly. But in a work of literature we see not only the
actors and their actions, but the manner in which they are regarded by
the author; and in this manner of regarding them lies the morality or
immorality. You may have as many