
nothing more. What on earth is the good of an artistic production of which
people in general are afraid to speak freely? You take your stand before the
Venus of the Capitol; you bid the attendant make it revolve slowly, and you
begin a lecture to your wife, your sister, or your young cousin, on the glories
of the masterpiece. You point out in detail how admirably Praxiteles has
exhibited every beauty of the female frame. Other ladies are standing by; you
smile blandly, and include them in your audience.«
    Mallard interrupted with a laugh.
    »Well, why not?« continued the other. »This isn't the gabinetto at Naples,
surely?«
    »But you are well aware that, practically, it comes to the same thing. How
often is one half pained, half amused, at the behaviour of women in the Tribune
at Florence! They are in a false position; it is absurd to ridicule them for
what your own sensations justify. For my own part, I always leave my wife and
Mrs. Baske to go about these galleries without my company. If I can't be
honestly at my ease, I won't make pretence of being so.«
    »All this is true enough, but the prejudice is absurd. We ought to despise
it and struggle against it.«
    »Despise it, many of us do, theoretically. But to make practical
demonstrations against it, is to oppose, as I said, all the civilization of our
world. Perhaps there will come a time once more when sculpture will be
justified; at present the art doesn't and can't exist. Its relics belong to
museums - in the English sense of the word.«
    »You only mean by this,« said Mallard, »that art isn't for the multitude. We
know that well enough.«
    »But there's a special difficulty about this point. We come across it in
literature as well. How is it that certain pages in literature, which all
intellectual people agree in pronouncing just as pure as they are great, could
never be read aloud, say, in a family circle, without occasioning pain and
dismay? No need to give illustrations; they occur to you in abundance. We skip
them, or we read mutteringly, or we say frankly that this is not adapted for
reading aloud. Yet no man would frown if he found his daughter bent over the
book. There's something radically wrong here.«
    »This is the old question of our English Puritanism. In France
