dity
renders them obstinately averse to the freedom of the artist in
dealing with the physical eccentricities of the grotesque human
animal.

We must not deal at large with the spirit lest we weary the vulgar
and the frivolous; we must not deal at large with the body, lest we
infuriate the Puritanical and the squeamish.

It is absurd to rail at de Maupassant because of his "brutality." One
cannot help suspecting that those who do so have never recognised
the absurd comedy of their own bodily activities and desires.

It is idle to protest against the outrageous excursions of his predatory
humour. The raw bleeding pieces--each, as one almost feels, with its
own peculiar cry--of the living body of the world, clawed as if by
tiger claws, are strange morsels for the taste of some among us. But
for others, there is an exultant pleasure in this great hunt, with the
deep-mouthed hounds of veracity and sincerity, after the authentic
truth.

One touches here--in this question of the brutality of Guy de
Maupassant--upon a very deep matter; the matter namely of what
our pleasure exactly consists, as we watch, in one of his more
savage stories, the flesh of the world's truth thus clawed at.

I think it is a pleasure composed of several different elements. The
first of these is that deep and curious satisfaction which we derive
from the exhibition in art of the essential grossness and
unscrupulousness of life. We revenge ourselves in this way upon
what makes us suffer. The clear presentation of an outrage, of an
insult, of an indecency, is in itself a sort of vengeance upon the
power that wrought it, and though it may sound ridiculous enough to
speak of being avenged upon Nature, still the basic instinct is there,
and we can, if we will, personify the immense malignity of things,
and fancy that we are striking back at the gods and causing the gods
some degree of perturbation; at least letting them know that we are
not deceived by the illusions they dole out to us!

The quiet gods may well be imagined as quite as indifferent to our
artistic vengeance as Nature herself, but at any rate, like the man in
the Inferno who "makes the fig" at the Almighty, we have found
vent for our human feelings. Another element in it is the pleasure we
get--not perhaps a very Christian one, but Literature deviates from
Christianity in several important ways--from having other people
made fully aware, as we may be, of the grossness and unscrupulous