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“I don’t see how you make that out; although I now understand what at first seemed to me mere inexplicable instincts–founded on nothing.”

“Some things are inexplicable, perhaps, but be sure instincts are not founded on nothing. Misconceptions are mere false conceptions; but a good half of what people call social convention is based upon a perfectly correct conception, only mankind has forgotten what that conception was. Well, I should place the various sorts of demoralization of which literature is capable in this order: No. 1, and least dangerous, sophistication of judgment; No. 2, and more dangerous, perversion of sympathy; No. 3, and most dangerous, inducement of questionable frame of mind. And I place them thus because it seems to me that this is the order of facility, and, consequently, universality; I mean that fewest people can be found who depend sufficiently on their deliberate ideas, and most effort is required to sophisticate them; whereas, least effort is required, and most effect produced, in the matter of inducing a mood; the perversion of sympathy is half-way. Of course, if we could imagine (as once or twice has actually been the case) that the moral ideas of a whole people were sophisticated, that would be the worst, because the least remediable; but, in the first place, people act but little from ideas, or few persons do, and it is difficult to alter people’s ideas; and, in the second place, the sophistication of conscience of single individuals is kept in check by the steadfastness of the mass of mankind, and, consequently, as in such men as Diderot, reduced to mere talk, without corresponding action. But a mood is easily induced without the reason even perceiving it, and the more necessary the mood is to nature, the more easily it will be aroused–the more unnatural an evil, the less danger of it; the more an evil is the mere excess of the necessary, the more danger there is of it.”

“It is curious how you marshal ideas into their right places,” said Cyril. “There remains one thing to be said about the ethics of impropriety. The people who go in for writing upon subjects which thirty years ago would have distinctly been forbidden, do not all of them write as Whitman does: they are not all what I should call openly beastly. They do their best, on the contrary, to spiritualize the merely animal.”

“That is just the most mischievous thing they could possibly do,” interrupted Baldwin. “I know the sort of poets you mean. They are the folk who say that things are pure or impure, holy or foul, according as we view them. They are not the brutal, straightforward, naturalistic school; they are the mystico-sensual. Of the two, they are infinitely the worse. For the straightforward naturalistic hogs generally turn your stomach before they have had a chance of doing you any harm; but these persuade themselves and you that, while you are just gloating over sensual images, you are improving your soul. They call brute desire passion, and love lust, and prostitution marriage, and the body the soul. Oh! I know them; they are the worst pests we have in literature.”

“But I don’t think they are intentionally immoral, Baldwin.”

“Do you think any writer ever was intentionally immoral, Cyril?”

“Well, I mean that these men really intend doing good. They think that if only some subjects be treated seriously, without any sniggering or grimacing, there ceases to be any harm in them. They say that they wish to rescue from out of the mire where prudery has thrown it, that which is clean in itself; they wish to show that the whole of Nature is holy; they wish to purify by sanctifying.”

Baldwin listened with a smile of contempt. “Of course such words seem very fine,” he said; “but a thing is either holy or is not holy: all the incense of poetry and all the hocus-pocus words of mysticism cannot alter its nature by a title. And woe betide us if we once think that any such ceremony of sanctification can take place; woe betide us if we disguise the foul as the innocent, or the merely indifferent as the holy! There is in Nature a great deal which is foul: in that which men are pleased to call unnatural, because Nature herself chastises it after having produced it: there is in Nature an infinite amount of abominable necessity and abominable possibility, which we have reason and conscience to separate from that which within Nature itself is innocent or holy. Mind, I say innocent or holy; for innocence and holiness are very different things. All our appetites, within due limits, are innocent, but they are not therefore holy; and that is just what mystico-sensual poetry fails to perceive, and in giving innocence the rank of holiness it makes it sinful. Do you know what is the really holy? It is that of which the world possesses too little, and can never possess too much: it is justice, charity, heroism, self-command, truthfulness, lovingness, beauty, genius–these things are holy. Place them, if you will, on a poetic altar, that all men may see them, and know them, and love them, and seek after them life-long without ever wearying. But do not enshrine in poetic splendours the merely innocent; that which bestows no merit on its possessor, that which we share with every scoundrel and every animal, that which is so universal that it must for ever be kept in check, and which, unless thus checked by that in ourselves which is truly holy, will degrade us lower than beasts. For in so doing–in thus attempting to glorify that in which there is nothing glorious–you make men think that self-indulgence is sanctity, you let them consume their lives in mere acquiescence with their lusts and laziness, while all around is raging the great battle between good and evil. Worst of all, in giving them this worship of a mystic Ashtaroth or Belial, you hide from them the knowledge of the true God, of the really and exclusively holy, of good, truth, beauty, to know and receive which into our soul we must struggle lifelong with the world and with ourselves; yes, struggle for the sake of the really holy with that mere innocence which is for ever threatening to become guilt.”