“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 pro flouncing 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, here in Italy, there is far less of such feeling.”

“Far less; but why must there be any at all?  And Puritanism isn’t a sufficient explanation.  The English Puritans of the really Puritan time had freedom of conversation which would horrify us of to-day.  We become more and more prudish as what we call civilization advances.  It is a hateful fact that, from the domestic point of view, there exists no difference between some of the noblest things in art and poetry, and the obscenities which are prosecuted; the one is as impossible of frank discussion as the other.”

“The domestic point of view is contemptible.  It means the bourgeois point of view, the Philistine point of view.”

“Then I myself, if I had children, should be both bourgeois and Philistine.  And so, I have a strong suspicion, would you too.”

“Very well,” replied Mallard, with some annoyance, “then it is one more reason why an artist should have nothing to do with domesticities.  But look here, you are wrong as regards me.  If ever I marry, amico mio, my wife shall learn to make more than a theoretical distinction between what is art and what is grossness.  If ever I have children, they shall from the first he taught a natural morality, and not the conventional.  If I can afford good casts of noble statues, they shall stand freely about my house.  When I read aloud, by the fire side, there shall be no skipping or muttering or frank omissions; no, by Apollo!  If a daughter of mine cannot describe to me the points of difference between the Venus of the Capitol and that of the Medici, she shall be bidden to use her eyes and her brains better.  I’ll have no contemptible prudery in my house!”

“Bravissimo!” cried Spenee, laughing.  “I see that my cousin Miriam is not the only person who has progressed during these years.  Do you remember a certain conversation of ours at Posillipo about the education of a certain young lady?”

“Yes, I do.  But that was a different matter.  The question was not of Greek statues and classical books, but of modern pruriencies and shallowness and irresponsibility.”

“You exaggerated then, and you do so now,” said Spence; “at present with less excuse.”