The cultured, therefore, who expect in every picture at least some reference to a familiar masterpiece, create, unconsciously enough, a thoroughly unwholesome atmosphere.  For they are rich and patronising and liberal.  They are the very innocent but natural enemies of originality, for an original work is the touchstone that exposes educated taste masquerading as sensibility.  Besides, it is reasonable that those who have been at such pains to sympathise with artists should expect artists to think and feel as they do.  Originality, however, thinks and feels for itself; commonly the original artist does not live the refined, intellectual life that would befit the fancy-man of the cultured classes.  He is not picturesque; perhaps he is positively inartistic; he is neither a gentleman nor a blackguard; culture is angry and incredulous.  Here is one who spends his working hours creating something that seems strange and disquieting and ugly, and devotes his leisure to simple animalities; surely one so utterly unlike ourselves cannot be an artist?  So culture attacks and sometimes ruins him.  If he survives, culture has to adopt him.  He becomes part of the tradition, a standard, a stick with which to beat the next original genius who dares to shove an unsponsored nose above water.

In the nineteenth century cultured people were amazed to find that such cads as Keats and Burns were also great poets.  They had to be accepted, and their caddishness had to be explained away.  The shocking intemperance of Burns was deplored in a paragraph, and passed over—­as though Burns were not as essentially a drunkard as a poet!  The vulgarity of Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne did not escape the nice censure of Matthew Arnold who could not be expected to see that a man incapable of writing such letters would not have written “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  In our day culture having failed to suppress Mr. Augustus John welcomes him with undiscriminating enthusiasm some ten years behind the times.  Here and there, a man of power may force the door, but culture never loves originality until it has lost the appearance of originality.  The original genius is ill to live with until he is dead.  Culture will not live with him; it takes as lover the artificer of the faux-bon.  It adores the man who is clever enough to imitate, not any particular work of art, but art itself.  It adores the man who gives in an unexpected way just what it has been taught to expect.  It wants, not art, but something so much like art that it can feel the sort of emotions it would be nice to feel for art.  To be frank, cultivated people are no fonder of art than the Philistines; but they like to get thrills, and they like to see old faces under new bonnets.  They admire Mr. Lavery’s seductive banalities and the literary and erudite novelettes of M. Rostand.  They go silly over Reinhardt and Bakst.  These confectioners seem to give the distinction of art to the natural thoughts and feelings of cultivated people.  Culture is