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 in the last resort moral.  The sense that they should be more moral than morality affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so.  Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails—­where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends.  Never, we suppose, was an age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than this.  Its philosophy has played it false.  It has passed from the nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of Aristotle’s Poetics, the mere title, The Philosophy of History would have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of instinct.  From one side comes the cry, ‘Man is a beast’; from the other, ‘Trust your instincts.’  The sole manifest employment of reason is to overthrow itself.  Yet it should be, in conjunction with the imagination, the vital principle of control.