no doubt
of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their
ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the
sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you
riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget
that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical
facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of
truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those
creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? What
right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger
for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same
truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to
bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did
you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the
most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the
greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one
moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe
your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the
world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who
guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why
did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's
responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you
clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had
not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us
because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?

But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with
morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is
conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital
centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism
inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only
temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a
supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an
adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is
no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.
The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised,
and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are i